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IAN 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 


AS MODIFIED BY HUMAN ACTION. 


BY 

GEORGE P. M ARSH. 


“ Not all the winds, and storms, and earthquakes, and seas, and seasons of the world, have 
done so much to revolutionize the earth as Man, the power of an endless life, has done since 
the day he came forth upon it, and received dominion over it.”—H. Bushnell, Sermon on. the 
Power of an Endless Life. 

* 



SAMPSON LOW, SON AND MARSTON, 14 LUDGATE HILL. 

1864. 


[ The right of Translation is reserved.] 











LON DON: 

PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, ST AM TOll D STREET AND CHARING CKOV.S. 


"■¥~ ^ \ 






( 

\ 



PREFACE. 


The object of the present volume is : to indicate the char¬ 
acter and, approximately, the extent of the changes produced 

by human action in the physical conditions of the globe we 
inhabit; to point out the dangers of imprudence and the neces¬ 
sity of caution in all operations which, on a large scale, inter¬ 
fere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the 
inorganic world ; to suggest the possibility and the importance 
of the restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material im¬ 
provement of waste and exhausted regions ; and, incidentally, 
to illustrate the doctrine, that man is, in both kind and degree, 
a power of a higher order than any of the other forms of ani¬ 
mated life, which, like him, are nourished at the table of 
bounteous nature. 

In the rudest stages of life, man depends upon spontaneous 
animal and vegetable growth for food and clothing, and his 
consumption of such products consequently diminishes the 
numerical abundance of the species which serve his uses. At 
more advanced periods, he protects and propagates certain 




1Y 


PREFACE. 






esculent vegetables and certain fowls and quadrupeds, and, at 
the same time, wars upon rival organisms which prey upon 
these objects of his care or obstruct the increase of their num¬ 
bers. Hence the action of man upon the organic world tends 
to sub, ert the original balance of its species, and while it reduces 


the numbers of some Of them, or even extiipates them. 


gether, it multiplies other forms of animal and vegetable life. 

The extension of agricultural and pastoral industry involves 
an enlargement of the sphere of man’s domain, by encroach¬ 
ment upon the forests which once covered the greater part of the 
earth’s surface otherwise adapted to his occupation. The fell¬ 
ing of the woods has been attended with momentous conse¬ 
quences to the drainage of the soil, to the external configura¬ 
tion of its surface, and probably, also, to local climate; and 
the importance of human life as a transforming power is, per¬ 
haps, more clearly demonstrable in the influence man has thus 
exerted upon superficial geography than in any other result of 
his material effort. 

Lands won from the woods must be both drained and irri- 

. 

gated; river banks and maritime coasts must be secured by 
means of artificial bulwarks against inundation by inland and 
by ocean floods; and the needs of commerce require the im¬ 
provement of natural, and the construction of artificial chan¬ 
nels of navigation. Thus man is compelled to extend over the 
unstable waters the empire he had already founded upon the 
solid land. 

The upheaval of the bed of seas and the movements of 
water and of wind expose vast deposits of sand, which occupy 











PREFACE. 


V 


space required for the convenience of man, and often, by the 
drifting of their particles, overwhelm the fields of human indus¬ 
try with invasions as disastrous as the incursions of the ocean. 
On the other hand, on many coasts, sand hills both protect 
the shores from erosion by the waves and currents, and shelter 
valuable grounds from blasting sea winds. Man, therefore, 
must sometimes resist, sometimes promote, the formation and 
growth of dunes, and subject the barren and flying sands to 
the same obedience to his will to wdiich he has reduced other 
forms of terrestrial surface. 

Besides these old and comparatively familiar methods of 
material improvement, modern ambition aspires to yet grander 
achievements in the conquest of physical nature, and projects 
are meditated which quite eclipse the boldest enterprises hith¬ 
erto undertaken for the modification of geographical surface. 

The natural character of the various fields where human 
industry has effected revolutions so important, and where the 
multiplying population and the impoverished resources of the 
globe demand new triumphs of mind over matter, suggests a 
corresponding division of the general subject, and I have con¬ 
formed the distribution of the several topics to the chronologi¬ 
cal succession in w r hich man must be supposed to have ex¬ 
tended his sway over the different provinces of his material 
kingdom. I have, then, in the Introductory chapter, stated, 
in a comprehensive way, the general effects and the prospec¬ 
tive consequences of human action upon the earth’s surface 
and the life which peoples it. This chapter is followed by 
four others in which I have traced the history of man’s indus- 


VI 


PREFACE. 


try as exerted upon Animal and Vegetable Life, upon the 
Woods, upon the Waters, and upon the Sands; and to these 
I have added a concluding chapter upon Probable and Possi¬ 
ble Geographical Revolutions yet to be effected by the art of 
man. 

I have only to add what, indeed, sufficiently appears upon 
every page of the volume, that I address myself not to professed 
physicists, but to the general intelligence of educated, observ¬ 
ing, and thinking men ; and that my purpose is rather to make 
practical suggestions than to indulge in theoretical specula¬ 
tions properly suited to a different class from that to which 
those for whom I write belong. 

GEORGE P. MARSH. 


Deceniber 1, 1863. 



















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*♦* 


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Vlll 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. 


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--Precis Elementaire d’Economie Politique, suivi du R6sum6 de l’His- 

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Boitel, Amedee. Mise en valeur des Terres pauvres par le Pin Maritime. 
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Boussingault, J. B. Economie Rurale consideree dans ses Rapports avec 
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IX 


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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. 


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Lavergne , M. L. de. Economie Rurale de la France, depuis 1789. 2me 
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Le Alpi che cingono l’ltalia. Parte ler, vol. ler. Torino, 1845. 8vo. 

Jjefort. Notice sur les travaux de Fixation des Dunes; in Annales des Ponts 
et Chaussdes, 1831, 2me semestre, pp. 320-332. 

Lenorvnant. Note relative 4 l’Execution d’un Puits Artesien en Egypte 
sous la XVlII me Dynastie; Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 
12 Novembre, 1852. 

Liber Albus: The White Book of the City of London. London, 1861. 4to. 

Lqftus, W. If. Travels and Researches in Chaldsea and Susiana. New 
York, 1857. 8vo. 




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. 


• • 

Xll 

Lombardini. Cenni Idrografi sulla Lombardia; Intorno al Sistema Idraulico 
del Po; epitomized by Baumgarten in Annales des Ponts et Ghaussees, 
1847, ler semestre, pp. 129, 199; and in Dumont, Des Travaux Pub¬ 
lics, pp. 268, 335. 

--Sui progetti intesi ad estendere l’irrigazione della Pianura del Po. 

Politecnico. Gennajo, 1863, pp. 5-50. 

Lorentz. Cours Ll6mentaire de Culture des Bois, complete et publie par 
A. Parade, 4me edition. Paris et Nancy, 1860. 8vo. 

Lyell, Sir Charles. The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man. 

London, 1863. 8vo. Principles of Geology. New York, 1862. 8vo. 
Mardigny , M. de. Memoire sur les Inondations des Rivieres de l’Ardeche. 
Paris, 1860. 8vo. 

Marschand , A. Ueber die Entwaldung der Gebirge. Bern, 1849. 12mo. 

pamphlet. 

Martineau. Endeavors after the Christian Life. Boston, 1858. 

Martins. Revue des Deux Mondes, Avril, 1863. 

Maury, M. F. The Physical Geography of the Sea. Tenth edition. Lon¬ 
don, 1861. 8vo. 

Medlicott , Dr. Observations of, quoted from London Athenaaum, 1863. 
Meguscher , Francesco. Memorie sulla migliore maniera per rimettere i 
Boschi della Lombardia, etc. Milano, 1859. 8vo. 

Mejdell, Th. Om Foranstaltninger til Behandling af Norges Skove. Chris¬ 
tiania, 1858. 8vo. 

Mella. Delle Inondazioni del Mella nella notte del 14 al 15 Agosto, 1850. 
Brescia, 1851. 8vo. 

Meyer , J. Physik der Schweiz. Leipzig, 1854. 8vo. 

Michelet , J. L’Insecte, 4me edition. Paris, 1860. 12mo. 

-L’Oiseau, True edition. Paris, 1861. 12mo. 

Monestier-Savignat, A. Ltude sur les Ph6nom£nes, l’Am6nagement et la 
Legislation des Eaux an point de vue des Inondations. Paris, 1858. 8vo. 
Montluisant. Note sur les Dess6chements, les Endiguements et les Irri¬ 
gations; in Annales des Ponts et Chaussees, 1833, 2me s6mestre, pp. 
281-294. 

Morozzi, Ferdinando. Dello Stato Antico e Moderno del Fiume Arno. 
Firenze, 1762. 4to. 

Muller , K. Das Buch der Pflanzenwelt. Leipzig, 1857. 2 vols. 12mo 
Nangis, Guillaume de. Extracts from, in Nouvelle Collection des M6moires 
pour servir par Michaud et Poujoulat. Yol. i. Paris, 1836. 

Nanquette , Henri. Cours d’AmOiagement des Forets. Paris et Nancy, 
1860. 8vo. 

Newberry , Dr. Report in Pacific Railroad Report, vol. vi. 
Niebelunge-Lied, Der. Abdruck der Handschrift von Joseph von Lassberg. 
Leipzig, 1840. Folio. 




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. 


Xlll 


Niel. L’Agriculture des £tats Sardes. Turin, 1857. 8vo. 

Pacific Railroad Report. Reports of Explorations and Surveys for a Rail¬ 
road Route to the Pacific. Washington, various years. 12 vols. 4to. 
Palmy , Bernard . (Euvres Completes, avec des Notes, etc., par Paul- 
Antoine Cap. Paris, 1844. 12mo. 

Parade , A. See Lorentz. 

Paramelle, Abbe. Quellenkunde, Lehre von der Bildung und Auffindung 
der Quellen; mit einem Yorwort von B. Cotta. Leipzig, 1856. 12mo. 
Parish , Dr. Life of Dr. Eleazer Wheelock. 8vo. 

Parry , G. G. Report in United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, vol. i. 
Parthey , G. Wanderungen durch Sicilien und die Levante. Berlin, 1834. 
2 vols. 12mo. 

Piper , R. U. The Trees of America. Boston, 1858, Nos. i-iv. 4to. 
Plinii , Historia Natur alis , ed. Hardouin. Paris, 1723. 3 vols. folio. 
Ponz, Antonio. Yiage de Espana. Madrid, 1788, etc. 18 vols. 12mo. 
Quatrefages, A. de. Souvenirs d’un Naturaliste. Paris, 1854. 2 vols. 12mo. 
Reclus , Elisee. Le Littoral de la France; Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 De- 
cembre, 1862. 

Rentzsch , Hermann. Der Wald im Haushalt der Natur und der Volks- 

wirthschaft. Leipzig, 1862. 8vo. 

Ribbe, Charles de. La Provence au point de vue des Bois, des Torrents et 
des Inondations. Paris, 1857. 8vo. 

Ridolji , Gosimo. Lezioni Orali. Firenze, 1862. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Ritter, Carl. Einleitung zur allgemeinen vergleichenden Geographie. 
Berlin, 1852. 8vo. 

-Die Erdkunde im Yerhaltniss zur Natur und zur Geschichte des 

*» 

Menschen. Berlin, various years. 19 vols. 8vo. 

Rosa , G. Le Condizioni de’ boschi, de’ fiumi e de’ torrenti nella provincia 
di Bergamo. Politecnico, Dicembre, 1861, pp. 606, 621. 

-Studii sui Boschi. Politecnico, Maggio, 1862, pp. 232, 238. 

Rossmassler , G. A. Der Wald. Leipzig und Heidelberg, 1863. 8vo. 

Roth , J. Der Yesuv und die Umgebung von Neapel. Berlin, 1857. 8vo. 
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partie du sol qu’ils ravagent. Paris, 1856. 8vo. pamphlet. 
Salvagnoli-Marchetti , Antonio. Memorie Economico-Statistiche sulle Ma- 
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1859. 8vo. 

-Rapporto sulle Operazioni Idrauliche ed Economiche eseguite nel 

1859-60 nelle Maremme Toscane. Firenze, 1860. 8vo. 







XIV 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. 


Sandys, George. A Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. 1610. Lon¬ 
don, 1627. Folio. 

Schacht , H. Les Arbres, Etudes sur leur Structure et leur Vegetation, 
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Schleiden, M. J. Die Landenge von Sues. Leipzig, 1858. 8vo. 

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Schubert, W. von. Resa genom Sverige, Norrige, Lappland, etc. Stock¬ 
holm, 1823. 3 vols. 8vo. 

Seneca, L. A. Opera Omnia quse supersunt, ex rec. Ruhkopf. Aug. Tauri- 
norum, 1831. 6 vols. 8vo. 

Simonde, J. E. L. Tableau de 1’Agriculture Toscane. Geneve, 1801. 8vo. 

Smith, Dr. William. A Dictionary of the Bible. London, 1860. 3 vols. 

8vo. 

- A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. London, 1854, 

1857. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Smith, John. Historie of Virginia. London, 1624. Folio. 

Somerville , Mary. Physical Geography. Fifth edition. London, 1862. 
12mo. 

Springer, John S. Forest-Life and Forest-Trees. New York, 1851. 12mo. 

Stanley , Dr. Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church. London, 
1863. 8vo. 

Staring, W. E. De Bodem van Nederland. Haarlem, 1856. 2 vols. 8vo. 

-Voormaals en Thaus. Haarlem, 1858. 8vo. 

Stevens, Gov. Report in Pacific Railroad Report, vol. xii. 

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Harper’s Magazine. New York, March, April, and May, 1855. 

Streffleur, V. Ueber die Natur and die Wirkungen der Wildbache. Sitz. 
Ber. der M. N. W. Classe der Kaiserl. Akad. der Wis. February, 1852, 
viii, p. 248. 

Strom, Isr. Om Skogarnas Vard och Skotsel. Upsala, 1853. Pamphlet. 

Surell, Alexandre. Etude sur les Torrents des Hautes Alpes. Paris, 
1844. 4to. 

Tartini, Ferdinando. Memorie sul Bonificamento delle Maremme Toscane. 
Firenze, 1838. Folio. 

Thomas and Baldwin. Gazetteer. Philadelphia, 1855. 1 vol. 8vo. 

Thompson, Z. History of Vermont, Natural, Civil, and Statistical. Bur¬ 
lington, 1842. 8vo. 

-- Appendix to History of Vermont. Burlington, 1853. 8vo. 

Titcomb, Timothy. Lessons in Life. New York, 1861. 12mo. 

Treadwell, Dr. Observations of, quoted from Report of Commissioner of 
Patents. 

Troy, Paul. Etude sur le Reboisement des Montagues. Paris et Toulouse, 
1861. 8vo. pamphlet. 






BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. 


XV 


Tschudi , Friedrich von. Ueber die Landwirthschaftliche Bedeutung der 
Vogel. St. Gallen, 1854. 12mo. 

Tschudi , J. J. von. Travels in Peru. New York, 1848. 8vo. 

ValUs, M. F. Etudes eur les Inondations, leurs causes et leurs effets. 
Paris, 1857. 8vo. 

Valvasor , Johann Weichard. Die Ehre des Herzogthums Crain. Lay back, 
1689. 4 vols. folio. 

Van Lennep. Extracts from Journal of, in the Missionary Herald. 

Vaupell, Ghr. Bogens Indvandring i de Danske Skove. Kjobenkavn, 1857. 
8vo. 

-De Nordsjfellandske Skovmoser. Kjobenhavn, 1851. 4to .pamphlet. 

Venema , G. A. Over bet Dalen van de Noordelijke Kuststreken van ons 
Land. Groningen, 1854. 8vo. 

Villa, Antonio Giovanni Batt. Necessity dei Boschi nella Lombardia. 
Milano, 1850. 4to. 

Viollet , J. B. Th6orie des Puits Artesiens. Paris, 1840. 8vo. 
Waltershamen , W. Sartorius von. Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau. 
Gottingen, 1863. 

Webster , Noah. A Collection of Papers on Political, Literary, and Moral 
Subjects. New York, 1843. 8vo. 

Wessely, Joseph. Die Oesterreichisclien Alpenliinder und ihre Forste. 
Wien, 1853. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Wetzstein , J. G. Pveisebericht liber Hauran und die Trachonen. Berlin, 
1860. 8vo. 

Wild, Albert. Die Niederlande. Leipzig, 1862. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Wilhelm, Gustav. Der Boden und das Wasser. Wien, 1861. 8vo. 
Williams , Dr. History of Vermont. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Wittwer, W. G. Die Physikaliscke Geographic. Leipzig, 1855. 8vo. 
Young , Arthur. Voyages en France, pendant les ann6es 1787, 1788, 1789, 
pr6c6dee d’une introduction par Lavergne. Paris, 1860. 2 vols. 12mo. 

_Voyages en Italie et en Espagne, pendant les ann6es 1787, 1789. 

Paris, 1860. 1 vol. 12mo. 






CHAPTER I. 


INTRODUCTORY. 


NATURAL ADVANTAGES OP THE TERRITORY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE—PHYS¬ 
ICAL DECAY OF THAT TERRITORY AND OF OTHER PARTS OF THE OLD WORLD 

-CAUSES OF THE DECAY-NEW SCHOOL OF GEOGRAPHERS—REACTION OF 

MAN UPON NATURE-OBSERVATION OF NATURE-COSMICAL AND GEOLOGICAL 

INFLUENCES—GEOGRAPHICAL INFLUENCE OF MAN—UNCERTAINTY OF OUR 
METEOROLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE—MECHANICAL EFFECTS PRODUCED BY MAN 
ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH—IMPORTANCE AND POSSIBILITY OF PHYS¬ 
ICAL RESTORATION-STABILITY OF NATURE-RESTORATION OF DISTURBED 

HARMONIES—DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN-PHYSICAL IMPROVEMENT—HUMAN 

AND BRUTE ACTION COMPARED—FORMS AND FORMATIONS MOST LIABLE TO 

PHYSICAL DEGRADATION—PHYSICAL DECAY OF NEW COUNTRIES-CORRUPT 

INFLUENCE OF PRIVATE CORPORATIONS, note. 


Natural Advantages of the Territory of the Roman Empire. 

The Roman Empire, at the period of its greatest expansion, 
comprised the regions of the earth most distinguished by a 
happy combination of physical advantages. The provinces 
bordering on the principal and the secondary basins of the 
Mediterranean enjoyed a healthfulness and an equability of 
climate, a fertility of soil, a variety of vegetable and mineral 
products, and natural facilities for the transportation and dis¬ 
tribution of exchangeable commodities, which have not been 
possessed in an equal degree by any territory of like extent 
in the Old World or the New. The abundance of the land and 
of the waters adequately supplied every material want, minis¬ 
tered liberally to every sensuous enjoyment. Gold and silver, 
indeed, were not found in the profusion which has proved so 
baneful to the industry of lands richer in veins of the precious 

1 


2 


THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 

metals; but mines and river beds yielded them in tlie spare 
measure most favorable to stability of value in the medium of 
exchange, and, consequently, to the regularity of commercial 
transactions. The ornaments of the barbaric pride of the 
East, the pearl, the ruby, the sapphire, and the diamond— 
though not unknown to the luxury of a people whose con¬ 
quests and whose wealth commanded whatever the habitable 
world could contribute to augment the material splendor of 
their social life—were scarcely native to the territory of the 
empire; but the comparative rarity of these gems in Europe, 
at somewhat earlier periods, was, perhaps, the very circum¬ 
stance that led the cunning artists of classic antiquity to 
enrich softer stones with engravings, which invest the common 
onyx and carnelian w T ith a worth surpassing, in cultivated 
eyes, the lustre of the most brilliant oriental jewels. 

Of these manifold blessings the temperature of the air, the 
distribution of the rains, the relative disposition of land and 
water, the plenty of the sea, the composition of the soil, and 
the raw material of some of the arts, were wholly gratuitous 
gifts. Yet the spontaneous nature of Europe, of Western 
Asia, of Libya, neither fed nor clothed the civilized inhabitants 
of those provinces. Every loaf was eaten in the sweat of the 
brow. All must be earned by toil. But toil was nowhere 
else rewarded by so generous wages; for nowhere would a 
given amount of intelligent labor produce so abundant, and, at 
the same time, so varied returns of the good things of material 
existence. The luxuriant harvests of cereals that waved on 
every field from the shores of the Rhine to the banks of the 
Rile, the vines that festooned the hillsides of Syria, of Italy, 
and of Greece, the olives of Spain, the fruits of the gardens of 
the Hesperides, the domestic quadrupeds and fowls known in 
ancient rural husbandry—all these were original products of 
foreign climes, naturalized in new homes, and gradually enno¬ 
bled by the art of man, while centuries of persevering labor 
were expelling the wild vegetation, and fitting the earth for 
the production of more generous growths. 

Only for the sense of landscape beauty did unaided nature 


PHYSICAL DECAY OF ROMAN PROVINCES. 


3 


make provision. Indeed, tlie very commonness of this source 
of refined enjoyment seems to have deprived it of half its 
value; and it was only in the infancy of lands where all the 
earth was fair, that Greek and Roman humanity had sym¬ 
pathy enough with the inanimate world to he alive to the 
charms of rural and of mountain scenery. In later genera¬ 
tions, when the glories of the landscape had been heightened 
by plantation, and decorative architecture, and other forms of 
picturesque improvement, the poets of Greece and Rome were 
blinded by excess of light, and became, at last, almost insensi¬ 
ble to beauties that now, even in their degraded state, enchant 
every eye, except, too often, those which a lifelong familiarity 
has dulled to their attractions. 


Physical Decay of the Territory of the Roman Empire , and 

of other parts of the Old World. 

If we compare the present physical condition of the coun¬ 
tries of which I am speaking, with the descriptions that ancient 
historians and geographers have given of their fertility and 
general capability of ministering to human uses, we shall find 
that more than one half of their whole extent—including the 
provinces most celebrated for the profusion and variety of 
their spontaneous and their cultivated products, and for the 
wealth and social advancement of their inhabitants—is either 
deserted by civilized man and surrendered to hopeless desola¬ 
tion, or at least greatly reduced in both productiveness and 
population. Vast forests have disappeared from mountain 
spurs and ridges ; the vegetable earth accumulated beneath the 
trees by the decay of leaves and fallen trunks, the soil of the 
alpine pastures which skirted and indented the woods, and the 
mould of the upland fields, are washed away; meadows, once 
fertilized by irrigation, are waste and unproductive, because 
the cisterns and reservoirs that supplied the ancient canals are 
broken, or the springs that fed them dried up ; rivers famous 
in history and song have shrunk to humble brooklets; the 
willows that ornamented and protected the banks of the lesser 


4 


PHYSICAL DECAY OF ROMAN PROVINCES. 


watercourses are gone, and tlie rivulets have ceased to exist as 
perennial currents, because the little water that finds its way 
into their old channels is evaporated by the droughts of sum¬ 
mer, or absorbed by the parched earth, before it readies the 
lowlands; the beds of the brooks have widened into broad 
expanses of pebbles and gravel, over which, though in the hot 
season passed dryshod, in winter sealike torrents thunder; 
the entrances of navigable streams are obstructed by sand¬ 
bars, and harbors, once marts of an extensive commerce, are 
shoaled by the deposits of the rivers at whose mouths they 
lie; the elevation of the beds of estuaries, and the conse¬ 
quently diminished velocity of the streams which flow into 
them, have converted thousands of leagues of shallow sea and 
fertile lowland into unproductive and miasmatic morasses. 

Besides the direct testimony of history to the ancient fer¬ 
tility of the regions to which I refer—Northern Africa, the 
greater Arabian peninsula, Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and 
many other provinces of Asia Minor, Greece, Sicily, and parts 
of even Italy and Spain—the multitude and extent of yet 
remaining architectural ruins, and of decayed works of inter¬ 
nal improvement, show that at former epochs a dense popula¬ 
tion inhabited those now lonely districts. Such a population 
could have been sustained only by a productiveness of soil of 
which we at present discover but slender traces; and the 
abundance derived from that fertility serves to explain how 
large armies, like those of the ancient Persians, and of the Cru¬ 
saders and the Tartars in later ages, could, without an organ¬ 
ized commmissariat, secure adequate supplies in long marches 
through territories which, in our times, would scarcely afford 
forage for a single regiment. 

It appears, then, that the fairest and fruitfulest provinces 
of the Boman Empire, precisely that portion of terrestrial sur¬ 
face, in short, which, about the commencement of the Chris¬ 
tian era, was endowed with the greatest superiority of soil, 
climate, and position, which had been carried to the highest 
pitch of physical improvement, and which thus combined the 
natural and artificial conditions best fitting it for the habita- 


CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY - . 


5 


tion and enjoyment of a dense and highly refined and cultivated 
population, is now completely exhausted of its fertility, or so 
diminished in productiveness, as, with the exception of a few 
favored oases that have escaped the general ruin, to be no 
longer capable of affording sustenance to civilized man. If 
to this realm of desolation we add the now wasted and soli¬ 
tary soils of Persia and the remoter East, that once fed their 
millions with milk and honey, we shall see that a territory 
larger than all Europe, the abundance of which sustained in 
bygone centuries a population scarcely inferior to that of the 
whole Christian world at the present day, has been entirely 
withdrawn from human use, or, at best, is tliinly inhabited by 
tribes too few in numbers, too poor in superfluous products, 
and too little advanced in culture and the social arts, to con¬ 
tribute anything to the general moral or material interests of 
the great commonwealth of man. 

Causes of this Decay. 

The decay of these once flourishing countries is partly due, 
no doubt, to that class of geological causes, whose action we 
can neither resist nor guide, and partly also to the direct vio¬ 
lence of hostile human force ; but it is, in a far greater propor¬ 
tion, either the result of man’s ignorant disregard of the laws 
of nature, or an incidental consequence of war, and of civil and 
ecclesiastical tyranny and misrule. Next to ignorance of these 
laws, the primitive source, the causa causarum , of the acts and 
neglects which have blasted with sterility and physical decrepi¬ 
tude the noblest half of the empire of the Ctesars, is, first, the 
brutal and exhausting despotism which Rome herself exercised 
over her conquered kingdoms, and even over her Italian terri¬ 
tory ; then, the host of temporal and spiritual tyrannies which 
she left as her dying curse to all her wide dominion, and 
which, in some form of violence or of fraud, still brood over 
almost every soil subdued by the Roman legions.* Man can- 

* In the Middle Ages, feudalism, and a nominal Christianity whose 
corruptions had converted the most beneficent of religions into the most 


6 


CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. 


not struggle at once against crushing oppression and the 
destructive forces of inorganic nature. When both are com¬ 
bined against him, he succumbs after a shorter or a longer 
struggle, and the fields he has won from the primeval wood 
relapse into their original state of wild and luxuriant, but 


baneful of superstitions, perpetuated every abuse of Roman tyranny, and 
added new oppressions and new methods of extortion to those invented 
by older despotisms. The burdens in question fell most heavily on the 
provinces that had been longest colonized by the Latin race, and these are 
the portions of Europe which have suffered the greatest physical degra¬ 
dation. “Feudalism,” says Blanqui, “was a concentration of scourges. 
The peasant, stripped of the inheritance of his fathers, became the prop¬ 
erty of inflexible, ignorant, indolent masters; he was obliged to travel 
fifty leagues with their carts whenever they required it; he labored for 
them three days in the week, and surrendered to them half the product 
of his earnings during the other three; without their consent he could 
not change his residence, or marry. And why, indeed, should he wish to 
marry, when he could scarcely save enough to maintain himself? The 
Abbot Alcuin had twenty thousand slaves, called serfs, who were forever 
attached to the soil. This is the great cause of the rapid depopulation ob¬ 
served in the Middle Ages, and of the prodigious multitude of monasteries 
which sprang up on every side. It was doubtless a relief to such misera¬ 
ble men to find in the cloisters a retreat from oppression ; but the human 
race never suffered a more cruel outrage, industry never received a wound 
better calculated to plunge the world again into the darkness of the rudest 
antiquity. It suffices to say that the prediction of the approaching end of 
the world, industriously spread by the rapacious monks at this time, was 
received without terror .”—Resume de VUistoire du Commerce , p. 156. 

The abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, which, in the time of Charle¬ 
magne, had possessed a million of acres, was, down to the Revolution, 
still so wealthy, that the personal income of the abbot was 300,000 livres. 
The abbey of Saint-Denis was nearly as rich as that of Saint-Germain-des- 
Prbs. —Laveegxe, Economic Rurale de la France, p. 104. 

Paul Louis Courier quotes from La Bruybre the following striking pic¬ 
ture of the condition of the French peasantry in his time: “ One sees 
certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female, scat¬ 
tered over the country and attached to the soil, which they root and turn 
over with indomitable perseverance. They have, as it were, an articulate 
voice, and when they rise to their feet, they show a human face. They 
are, in fact, men; they creep at night into dens, where they live on black 
bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the labor of ploughing, 


ROMAN OPPRESSION. 


7 


unprofitable forest growth, or fall into that of a dry and bar¬ 
ren wilderness. 

Rome imposed on the products of agricultural labor in the 
rural districts taxes which the sale of the entire harvest would 
scarcely discharge; she drained them of their population by 
military conscription; she impoverished the peasantry by 
forced and unpaid labor on public works; she hampered 
industry and internal commerce by absurd restrictions and 
unwise regulations. Hence, large tracts of land were left 
uncultivated, or altogether deserted, and exposed to all the 
destructive forces which act with such energy on the surface 
of the earth when it is deprived of those protections by which 
nature originally guarded it, and for which, in well-ordered 
husbandry, human ingenuity has contrived more or less effi¬ 
cient substitutes.* Similar abuses have tended to perpetuate 
and extend these evils in later ages, and it is but recently that, 
even in the most populous parts of Europe, public attention 

sowing, and harvesting, and therefore deserve some small share of the 
bread they have grown.” “These are his own words,” adds Courier; 
“ he is speaking of the fortunate peasants, of those who had work and 
bread, and they were then the few.”— Petition d la Gharnbre des Deputes 
pour les Villageois que Von empeche de danser. 

Arthur Young, who travelled in France from 1787 to 1789, gives, in 
the twenty-first chapter of his Travels, a frightful account of the burdens 
of the rural population even at that late period. Besides the regular 
governmental taxes, and a multitude of heavy fines imposed for trifling 
oftences, he enumerates about thirty seignorial rights, the very origin and 
nature of some of which are now unknown, while those of some others, 
claimed and enforced by ecclesiastical as well as by temporal lords, are as 
repulsive to humanity and morality, as the worst abuses ever practised by 
heathen despotism. Most of these, indeed, had been commuted for money 
payments, and were levied on the peasantry as pecuniary imposts for the 
benefit of prelates and lay lords, who, by virtue of their nobility, were 
exempt from taxation. Who can wonder at the hostility of the French 
plebeian classes toward the aristocracy in the days of the Revolution? 

* The temporary depopulation of an exhausted soil may be, in some 
cases, a physical, though, like fallows in agriculture, a dear-bought advan¬ 
tage. Under favorable circumstances, the withdrawal of man and his 
flocks allows the earth to clothe itself again with forests, and in a few 
generations to recover its ancient productiveness. In the Middle Ages, 


8 


PHYSICAL RESTORATION-MAN AND NATURE. 


lias been half awakened to the necessity of restoring the dis¬ 
turbed harmonies of nature, whose well-balanced influences 
are so propitious to all her organic offspring, of repaying to 
our great mother the debt which the prodigality and the tlirift- 
lessness of former generations have imposed upon their succes¬ 
sors—thus fulfilling the command of religion and of practical 
wisdom, to use this world as not abusing it. 

New School of Geographers. 

The labors of Humboldt, of Hitter, of Guyot, and their 
followers have given to the science of geography a more 
philosophical, and, at the same time, a more imaginative char¬ 
acter than it had received from the hands of their predecessors. 
Perhaps the most interesting field of speculation, thrown open 
by the new school to the cultivators of this attractive study, is 
the inquiry: how far external physical conditions, and espe¬ 
cially the configuration of the earth’s surface, and the distribu¬ 
tion, outline, and relative position of land and water, have 
influenced the social life and social progress of man. 

Reaction of Man on Nature. 

But, as we have seen, man has reacted upon organized and 
inorganic nature, and thereby modified, if not determined, the 
material structure of his earthly home. The measure of that 
reaction manifestly constitutes a very important element in the 
appreciation of the relations between mind and matter, as well 
as in the discussion of many purely physical problems. But 
though the subject has been incidentally touched upon by 
many geographers, and treated with much fulness of detail in 
regard to certain limited fields of human effort, and to certain 
specific effects of human action, it has not, as a whole, so far 
as I know, been made matter of special observation, or of liis- 

worn-out fields were depopulated, in many parts of the Continent, by civil 
and ecclesiastical tyrannies, which insisted on the surrender of the half of 
a loaf already too small to sustain its producer. Thus abandoned, these 
lands often relapsed into the forest state, and, some centuries later, were 
again brought under cultivation with renovated fertility. 


NATURE AND MAN—WANT OP FACTS. 


9 


torical research by any scientific inquirer.* Indeed, until the 
influence of physical geography upon human life was recog¬ 
nized as a distinct branch of philosophical investigation, there 
was no motive for the pursuit of such speculations ; and it was 
desirable to inquire whether we have or can become the archi¬ 
tects of our own abiding place, only when it was known how 
the mode of our physical, moral, and intellectual being is 
affected by the character of the home which Providence has 
appointed, and we have fashioned, for our material habitation.f 
It is still too early to attempt scientific method in discuss¬ 
ing this problem, nor is our present store of the necessary facts 
by any means complete enough to warrant me in promising 
any approach to fulness of statement respecting them. Sys¬ 
tematic observation in relation to this subject has hardly yet 
begun ,\ and the scattered data which have chanced to be 
recorded have never been collected. It has now no place in 
the general scheme of physical science, and is matter of sug- 

* The subject of climatic change, with and without reference to human 
action as a cause, has been much discussed by Moreau de Jonnes, Dureau 
de la Malle, Arago, Humboldt, Fuster, Gasparin, Becquerel, and many 
other writers in Europe, and by Hoah Webster, Forry, Drake, and others 
in America. Fraas has endeavored to show, by the history of vegetation 
in Greece, not merely that clearing and cultivation have affected climate, 
but that change of climate has essentially modified the character of vege¬ 
table life. See his Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit. 

t Gods Almagt wenkte van den troon, 

En schiep elk volk een land ter woon : 

Hier vestte Zij een grondgebied, 

Dat Zij ons zelven scheppen liet. 

I The udometric measurements of Belgrand, reported in the Annates 
Forestieres for 1854, and discussed by Valles in chap, vi of his Etudes 
8ur les Inondations , constitute the earliest, and, in some respects, the most 
remarkable series known to me, of persevering and systematic observa¬ 
tions bearing directly and exclusively upon the influence of human action 
on climate, or, to speak more accurately, on precipitation and natural 
drainage. The conclusions of Belgrand, however, and of Vall&s, who 
adopts them, have not been generally accepted by the scientific world, and 
they seem to have been, in part at least, refuted by the arguments of Heri- 
court and the observations of Cantegril, Jeandel, and Belland. See chapter 
iii: The Woods. 


10 


SELF-TEACHING. 


gestion and speculation only, not of established and positive 
conclusion. At present, then, all that I can hope is to excite 
an interest in a topic of much economical importance, by 
pointing out the directions and illustrating the modes in 
which human action has been or may be most injurious or 
most beneficial in its influence upon the physical conditions of 
the earth we inhabit. 

Observation of Nature. 

In these pages, as in all I have ever written or propose to 
write, it is my aim to stimulate, not to satisfy, curiosity, and it 
is no part of my object to save my readers the labor of obser¬ 
vation or of thought. For labor is life, and 

Death lives where power lives unused.* 

Self is the schoolmaster whose lessons are best worth his 
wages; and since the subject I am considering has not yet 
become a branch of formal instruction, those whom it may 
interest can, fortunately, have no pedagogue but themselves. 
To the natural philosopher, the descriptive poet, the painter, 
and the sculptor, as well as to the common observer, the power 
most important to cultivate, and, at the same time, hardest to 
acquire, is that of seeing what is before him. Sight is a fac¬ 
ulty ; seeing, an art. The eye is a physical, but not a self¬ 
acting apparatus, and in general it sees only what it seeks. 
Like a mirror, it reflects objects presented to it; but it may be 
as insensible as a mirror, and it does not necessarily perceive 
what it reflects.f It is disputed whether the purely material 

* Yerses addressed by G. C. to Sir Walter Raleigh.— Hakluyt, i, p. 668. 

t- I troer, at Syuets Sands er lagt i Oiet, 

Mens dette kun er Redskab. Synet strommer 
Fra Sjaelens Dyb, og Oiets fine Nerver 
Gaae ud fra Hjernens hemmelige Vcerksted. 

Paludan-Mullee, Kong Rene’s Dattcr , sc. ii. 

In the material eye, you think, sight lodgeth ! 

The eye is but an organ. Seeing streameth 

From the soul’s inmost depths. The fine perceptive 

Nerve springetli from the brain’s mysterious workshop. 



CULTIVATION OF THE EYE. 


11 


sensibility of tlie eye is capable of improvement and cultiva¬ 
tion. It has been maintained by high authority, that the nat¬ 
ural acuteness of none of our sensuous faculties can be height¬ 
ened by use, and hence that the minutest details of the image 
formed on the retina are as perfect in the most untrained, as 
in the most thoroughly disciplined organ. This may well be 
doubted, and it is agreed on all hands that the power of multi¬ 
farious perception and rapid discrimination may be immensely 
increased by well-directed practice.* This exercise of the eye 

* Skill in marksmanship, whether with firearms or with other projec¬ 
tile weapons, depends more upon the training of the eye than is generally 
supposed, and I have often found particularly good shots to possess an 
almost telescopic vision. In the ordinary use of the rifle, the barrel 
serves as a guide to the eye, but there are sportsmen who fire with the 
but of the gun at the hip. In this case, as in the use of the sling, the lasso, 
and the bolas, in hurling the knife (see Babinet, Lectures , vii, p. 84), in 
throwing the boomerang, the javelin, or a stone, and in the employment 
of the blow pipe and the bow, the movements of the hand and arm are 
guided by that mysterious sympathy which exists between the eye and 
the unseeing organs of the body. 

In shooting the tortoises of the Amazon and its tributaries, the Indians 
use an arrow with a long twine and a float attached to it. Ave-Lallemant 
{Die Benutzung der Palmen am Amazonenstrom , p. 32) thus describes their 
mode of aiming : “ As the arrow, if aimed directly at the floating tortoise, 
would strike it at a small angle, and glance from its flat and wet shell, the 
archers have a peculiar method of shooting. They are able to calculate 
exactly their own muscular effort, the velocity of the stream, the distance 
and size of the tortoise, and they shoot the arrow directly up into the air, 
so that it falls almost vertically upon the shell of the tortoise, and sticks 
in it.” Analogous calculations—if such physico-mental operations can 
properly be so called—are made in the use of other missiles ; for no projec¬ 
tile flies in a right line to its mark. But the exact training of the eye lies 
at the bottom of all of them, and marksmanship depends almost wholly upon 
the power of that organ, whose directions the blind muscles implicitly 
follow. It is perhaps not out of place to observe here that our English 
word aim comes from the Latin cestimo , I calculate or estimate. See 
Wedgwood’s Dictionary of English Etymology , and the note to the Amer¬ 
ican edition, under Aim. 

Another proof of the control of the limbs by the eye has been observed 
in deaf-and-dumb schools, and others where pupils are first taught to write 
on large slates or blackboards. The writing is in large characters, the 


12 


8TUDY OF PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 


I desire to promote, and, next to moral and religious doctrine, 
I know no more important practical lessons in this earthly life 
of ours—which, to the wise man, is a school from the cradle to 
the grave—than those relating to the employment of the sense 
of vision in the study of nature. 

The pursuit of physical geography, embracing actual obser¬ 
vation of terrestrial surface, affords to the eye the best general 
training that is accessible to all. The majority of even culti¬ 
vated men have not the time and means of acquiring anything 
beyond a very superficial acquaintance with any branch of 
physical knowledge. Natural science has become so vastly 
extended, its recorded facts and its unanswered questions so 
immensely multiplied, that every strictly scientific man must 
be a specialist, and confine the researches of a whole life within 
a comparatively narrow circle. The study I am recommend¬ 
ing, in the view I propose to take of it, is yet in that imper¬ 
fectly developed state which allows its votaries to occupy 
themselves with such broad and general views as are attain¬ 
able by every person of culture, and it does not now require a 

small letters being an inch or more high. They are formed with chalk or 
a slate pencil firmly grasped in the fingers, and by appropriate motions of 
the wrist, elbow, and shoulder, not of the finger joints. Nevertheless, 
when a pen is put into the hand of a pupil thus taught, his handwriting, 
though produced by a totally different set of muscles and muscular move¬ 
ments, is identical in character with that which he has practised on the 
blackboard. 

It has been much doubted whether the artists of the classic ages pos¬ 
sessed a more perfect sight than those of modern times, or whether, in exe¬ 
cuting their minute mosaics and gem engravings, they used magnifiers. 
Glasses ground convex have been found at Pompeii, but they are too 
rudely fashioned and too imperfectly polished to have been of any prac¬ 
tical use for optical purposes. But though the ancient artists may have 
had a microscopic vision, their astronomers cannot have had a telescopic 
power of sight; for they did not discover the satellites of Jupiter, which 
are often seen with the naked eye at Oormeeah, in Persia, and sometimes, 
as I can testify by personal observation, at Cairo. 

For a very remarkable account of the restoration of vision impaired 
from age, by judicious training, see Lessons in Life , by Timothy Titoomb, 
lesson xi. 


GEOLOGICAL INFLUENCES—INFLUENCE OF HUMAN ACTION. 13 

knowledge of special details which only years of application 
can master. It may be profitably pursued by all; and every 
traveller, every lover of rural scenery, every agriculturist, who 
will wisely use the gift of sight, may add valuable contribu¬ 
tions to the common stock of knowledge on a subject which, 
as I hope to convince my readers, though long neglected, and 
now inartificially presented, is not only a very important, but 
a very interesting field of inquiry. 


Cosmical and Geological Influences. 

The revolutions of the seasons, with their alternations of 
temperature, and of length of day and night, the climates of 
different zones, and the general condition and movements of 
the atmosphere and the seas, depend upon causes for the most 
part cosmical, and, of course, wholly beyond our control. The 
elevation, configuration, and composition of the great masses 
of terrestrial surface, and the relative extent and distribution 
of land and water, are determined by geological influences 
equally remote from our jurisdiction. It would hence seem 
that the physical adaptation of different portions of the earth 
to the use and enj oyment of man is a matter so strictly belong¬ 
ing to mightier than human powers, that we can only accept 
geographical nature as we find her, and be content with such 
soils and such skies as she spontaneously offers. 


Geographical Influence of Man. 

But it is certain that man has done much to mould the 
form of the earth’s surface, though we cannot always distin¬ 
guish between the results of his action and the effects of 
purely geological causes; that the destruction of the forests, 
the drainage of lakes and marshes, and the operations of rural 
husbandry and industrial art have tended to produce great 
changes in the liygrometric, thermometric, electric, and chem¬ 
ical condition of the atmosphere, though we are not yet able to 
measure the force of the different elements of disturbance, or 


14 


INFLUENCE OF HUMAN ACTION. 


to say liow far they have been compensated by each other, or 
by still obscurer influences; and, Anally, that the myriad 
forms of animal and vegetable life, which covered the earth 
when man first entered upon the theatre ot a nature whose 
harmonies he was destined to derange, have been, through his 
action, greatly changed in numerical proportion, sometimes 
much modified in form and product, and sometimes entirely 
extirpated. 

The physical revolutions thus wrought by man have not 
all been destructive to human interests. Soils to which no 
nutritious vegetable was indigenous, countries which once 
brought forth but the fewest products suited for the sustenance 
and comfort of man—while the severity of their climates cre¬ 
ated and stimulated the greatest number and the most impe¬ 
rious urgency of physical wants—surfaces the most rugged 
and intractable, and least blessed with natural facilities of com¬ 
munication, have been made in modern times to yield and 
distribute all that supplies the material necessities, all that 
contributes to the sensuous enjoyments and conveniences of 
civilized life. The Scythia, the Thule, the Britain, the Ger¬ 
many, and the Gaul which the Roman writers describe in such 
forbidding terms, have been brought almost to rival the native 
luxuriance and easily won plenty of Southern Italy; and, 
while the fountains of oil and wine that refreshed old Greece 
and Syria and Northern Africa have almost ceased to flow, 
and the soils of those fair lands are turned to thirsty and inhos¬ 
pitable deserts, the hyperborean regions of Europe have con¬ 
quered, or rather compensated, the rigors of climate, and 
attained to a material wealth and variety of product that, 
with all their natural advantages, the granaries of the ancient 
world can hardly be said to have enjoyed. 

These changes for evil and for good have not been caused 
by great natural revolutions of the globe, nor are they by any 
means attributable wholly to the moral and physical action or 
inaction of the peoples, or, in all cases, even of the races that 
now inhabit these respective regions. They are products of a 
complication of conflicting or coincident forces, acting through 


UNCERTAINTY OF DATA. 


15 


a long series of generations; here, improvidence, wastefulness, 
and wanton violence; there, foresight and wisely guided per¬ 
severing industry. So far as they are purely the calculated 
and desired results of those simple and familiar operations of 
agriculture and of social life which are as universal as civil¬ 
ization—the removal of the forests which covered the soil 
required for the cultivation of edible fruits, the drying of here 
and there a few acres too moist for profitable husbandry, by 
draining off the surface waters, the substitution of domesti¬ 
cated and nutritious for wild and unprofitable vegetable 
growths, the construction of roads and canals and artificial 
harbors—they belong to the sphere of rural, commercial, and 
political economy more properly than to geography, and 
hence are but incidentally embraced within the range of our 
present inquiries, which concern physical, not financial bal¬ 
ances. I propose to examine only the greater, more perma¬ 
nent, and more comprehensive mutations which man has pro¬ 
duced, and is producing, in earth, sea, and sky, sometimes, 
indeed, with conscious purpose, but for the most part, as 
unforseen though natural consequences of acts performed for 
narrower and more immediate ends. 

The exact measurement of the geographical changes hith¬ 
erto thus effected is, as I have hinted, impracticable, and we 
possess, in relation to them, the means of only qualitative, not 
quantitative analysis. The fact of such revolutions is estab¬ 
lished partly by historical evidence, partly by analogical 
deduction from effects produced in our own time by opera¬ 
tions similar in character to those which must have taken 
place in more or less remote ages of human action. Both 
sources of information are alike defective in precision ; the 
latter, for general reasons too obvious to require specification ; 
the former, because the facts to which it bears testimony 
occurred before the habit or the means of rigorously scientific 
observation upon any branch of physical research, and espe¬ 
cially upon climatic changes, existed. 


16 


METEOROLOGY—ANCIENT HUMAN RELICS. 


Uncertainty of our Meteorological Knowledge. 

The invention of measures of heat, and of atmospheric 
moisture, pressure, and precipitation, is extremely recent. 
Hence, ancient physicists have left us no thermometric or 
barometric records, no tables of the fall, evaporation, and flow 
of waters, and even no accurate maps of coast lines and the 
course of rivers. Their notices of these phenomena are almost 
wholly confined to excessive and exceptional instances of high 
or of low temperatures, extraordinary falls of rain and snow, 
and unusual floods or droughts. Our knowledge of the 
meteorological condition of the earth, at any period more than 
two centuries before our own time, is derived from these 
imperfect details, from the vague statements of ancient histo¬ 
rians and geographers in regard to the volume of rivers, and 
the relative extent of forest and cultivated land, from the indi¬ 
cations furnished by the history of the agriculture and rural 
economy of past generations, and from other almost purely 
casual sources of information. 

Among these latter we must rank certain newly laid open 
fields of investigation, from which facts bearing on the point 
now under consideration have been gathered. I allude to the 
discovery of artificial objects in geological formations older 
than any hitherto recognized as exhibiting traces of the exist¬ 
ence of man ; to the ancient lacustrine habitations of Switzer¬ 
land, containing the implements of the occupants, remains of 
their food, and other relics of human life ; to the curious reve¬ 
lations of the Kjokkenmoddinger, or heaps of kitchen refuse, 
in Denmark, and of the peat mosses in the same and other 
northern countries; to the dwellings and other evidences of 
the industry of man in remote ages sometimes laid bare by 
the movement of sand dunes on the coasts of France and of 
the North Sea ; and to the facts disclosed on the shores of the 
latter, by excavations in inhabited mounds which were, per¬ 
haps, raised before the period of the Roman Empire. These 
remains are memorials of races which have left no written 
records, because they perished before the historical period of 



ARTS OF RUDE TRIBES. 


17 


tlie countries they occupied began. The plants and animals 
that furnished the relics found in the deposits were certainly 
contemporaneous with man ; for they are associated with his 
works, and have evidently served his uses. In some cases, the 
animals belonged to species well ascertained to he now alto¬ 
gether extinct; in some others, both the animals and the 
vegetables, though extant elsewhere, have ceased to inhabit 
the regions where their remains are discovered. From the 
character of the artificial objects, as compared with others 
belonging to known dates, or at least to known periods of 
civilization, ingenious inferences have been drawn as to their 
age; and from the vegetation, remains of which accompany 
them, as to the climates of Central and Northern Europe at 
the time of their production. 

There are, however, sources of error which have not always 
been sufficiently guarded against in making these estimates. 
When a boat, composed of several pieces of wood fastened 
together by pins of the same material, is dug out of a bog, it 
is inferred that the vessel, the skeletons, and the implements 
found with it, belong to an age when the use of iron was not 
known to the builders. But this conclusion is not warranted 
by the simple fact that metals were not employed in its con¬ 
struction ; for the Nubians at this day build boats large enough 
to carry half a dozen persons across the Nile, out of small 
pieces of acacia wood pinned together entirely with wooden 
bolts. Nor is the occurrence of Hint arrow heads and knives, 
in conjunction with other evidences of human life, conclusive 
proof as to the antiquity of the latter. Lyell informs us that 
some Oriental tribes still continue to use the same stone imple¬ 
ments as their ancestors, “ after that mighty empires, where 
the use of metals in the arts was well known, had flourished 
for three thousand years in their neighborhood; ” * and the 
North American Indians now manufacture and use weapons 
of stone, and even of glass, chipping them in the latter case 
out of the bottoms of thick bottles, with great facility.j* 

* Antiquity of Man, p. 377. 

f “ One of them [the Indians] seated himself near me, and made from 
2 


18 


COMMERCE OF RUDE TRIBES. 


We may also be misled by our ignorance of tlie commer¬ 
cial relations existing between savage tribes. Extremely rude 
nations, in spite of their jealousies and their perpetual wars, 
sometimes contrive to exchange the products of provinces very 
widely separated from each other. The mounds of Ohio con¬ 
tain pearls, thought to be marine, which must have come from 
the Gulf of Mexico, or perhaps even from California, and the 
knives and pipes found in the same graves are often formed of 
far-fetched material, that was naturally paid for by some home 
product exported to the locality whence the material was 
derived. The art of preserving fish, flesh, and fowl by drying 
and smoking is widely diffused, and of great antiquity. The 
Indians of Long Island Sound are said to have carried on a 
trade in dried shell fish with tribes residing very far inland. 
Erom the earliest ages, the inhabitants of the Faroe and 
Orkney Islands, and of the opposite mainland coasts, have 
smoked wild fowl and other flesh. Hence it is possible that 
the animal and the vegetable food, the remains of which are 
found in the ancient deposits I am speaking of, may sometimes 
have been brought from climates remote from that where it 
was consumed. 

The most important, as well as the most trustworthy con- 

a fragment of quartz, with a simple piece of round hone, one end of which 
was hemispherical, with a small crease in it (as if worn by a thread) the 
sixteenth of an inch deep, an arrow head which was very sharp and pier¬ 
cing, and such as they use on all their arrows. The skill and rapidity with 
which it was made, without a blow, but by simply breaking the sharp 
edges with the creased bone by the strength of his hands—for the crease 
merely served to prevent the instrument from slipping, affording no lever¬ 
age—was remarkable .”—Reports of Explorations and Surveys for Pacific 
Railroad, vol. ii, 1855, Lieut. Beckwith’s Report , p. 43. 

It has been said that stone weapons are not found in Sicily, except in 
certain caves half filled with the skeletons of extinct animals. If they 
have not been found in that island in more easily accessible localities, I 
suspect it is because eyes familiar with such objects have not sought for 
them. In January, 1854, I picked up an arrow head of quartz in a little 
ravine or furrow just washed out by a heavy rain, in a field near the 
Simeto. It is rudely fashioned, but its artificial character and its special 
purpose are quite unequivocal. 




METEOROLOGY. 


19 


elusions with respect to the climate of ancient Europe and 
Asia, are those drawn from the accounts given by the classical 
writers of the growth of cultivated plants; but these are by 
no means free from uncertainty, because we can seldom be 
sure of an identity of species, almost never of an identity of 
race or variety, between vegetables known to the agriculturists 
of Greece and Rome and those of modern times which are 
thought most nearly to resemble them. Besides this, there is 
always room for doubt whether the habits of plants long 
grown in different countries may not have been so changed 
by domestication that the conditions of temperature and 
humidity which they required twenty centuries ago were 
different from those at present demanded for their advan¬ 
tageous cultivation.* 

* Probably no cultivated vegetable affords so good an opportunity of 
studying the laws of acclimation of plants as maize or Indian corn. 
Maize is grown from the tropics to at least lat. 47° in Northeastern 
America, and farther north in Europe. Every two or three degrees of 
latitude brings you to a new variety, with new climatic adaptations, and 
the capacity of the plant to accommodate itself to new conditions of tem¬ 
perature and season seems almost unlimited. We may easily suppose a 
variety of this grain, which had become acclimated in still higher latitudes, 
to have been lost, and in such case the failure to raise a crop from seed 
brought from some distance to the south would not prove that the climate 
had become colder. 

Many persons now living remember that, when the common tomato 
was first introduced into Northern New England, it often failed to ripen; 
but, in the course of a very few years, it completely adapted itself to the 
climate, and now not only matures both its fruit and its seeds with as 
much certainty as any cultivated vegetable, but regularly propagates itself 
by self-sown seed. Meteorological observations, however, do not show 
any amelioration of the summer climate in those States within that 
period. 

Maize and the tomato, if not new to human use, have not been long 
known to civilization, and were, very probably, reclaimed and domesti¬ 
cated at a much more recent period than the plants which form the great 
staples of agricultural husbandry in Europe and Asia. Is the great power 
of accomodation to climate possessed by them due to this circumstance ? 
There is some reason to suppose that the character of maize has been sen¬ 
sibly changed by cultivation in South America; for, according to Poppig, 




20 


CLIMATIC CHANGE. 


Even if we suppose an identity of species, of race, and of 
habit to be established between a given ancient and modern 
plant, the negative fact that the latter will not grow now 
where it flourished two thousand years ago does not in all 
cases prove a change of climate. The same result might 
follow from the exhaustion of the soil,* or from a change in 
the quantity of moisture it habitually contains. After a dis¬ 
trict of country has been completely or even partially cleared 
of its forest growth, and brought under cultivation, the drying 
of the soil, under favorable circumstances, goes on for genera¬ 
tions, perhaps for ages.f In other cases, from injudicious 

the ears of this grain found in old Peruvian tombs belong to varieties not 
now known in Peru.— Travels in Peru , chap. vii. 

* The cultivation of madder is said to have been introduced into Europe 
by an Oriental in the year 1765, and it was first planted in the neighbor¬ 
hood of Avignon. Of course, it has been grown in that district for less 
than a century; but upon soils where it has been a frequent crop, it is 
already losing much of its coloring properties.— Lavergne, Economic Pu- 
rale de la France , pp. 259-291. 

I believe there is no doubt that the cultivation of madder in the vicinity 
of Avignon is of recent introduction ; but it appears from Puller and other 
evidence, that this plant was grown in Europe before the middle of the 
seventeenth century. The madder brought to France from Persia may be 
of a different species, or, at least, variety. “ Some two years since,” says 
Fuller, “madder was sown by Sir Nicholas Crispe at Debtford, and I hope 
will have good success ; first because it groweth in Zeland in the same (if 
not a more northern) latitude. Secondly, because wild madder grows here 
in abundance ; and why may not tame madder if cicurated by art. 
Lastly, because as good as any grew some thirty years since at Barn-Elms, 
in Surrey, though it quit not cost through some error in the first planter 
thereof, which now we hope will be rectified.”— Fuller, Worthies of Eng¬ 
land, ii, pp. 57, 58. 

Perhaps the recent diseases of the olive, the vine, and the silkworm— 
the prevailing malady of which insect is supposed by some to be the effect 
of an incipient decay of the mulberry tree—may be, in part, due to 
changes produced in the character of the soil by exhaustion through long 
cultivation. 

t In many parts of New England there are tracts, miles in extent, and 
presenting all varieties of surface and exposure, which were partially cleared 
sixty or seventy years ago, and wTiere little or no change in the proportion 
of cultivated ground, pasturage, and woodland has taken place since. In 












CLIMATIC CHANGE. 


21 


husbandry, or tlie diversion or choking up of natural water¬ 
courses, it may become more highly charged with humidity. 
An increase or diminution of the moisture of a soil almost 
necessarily supposes an elevation or a depression of its winter 
or its summer heat, and of its extreme, if not of its mean 
annual temperature, though such elevation or depression may 
be so slight as not sensibly to raise or lower the mercury in a 
thermometer exposed to the open air. Any of these causes, 
more or less humidity, or more or less warmth of soil, would 
affect the growth both of wild and of cultivated vegetation, 
and consequently, without any appreciable change in atmo¬ 
spheric temperature, precipitation, or evaporation, plants of a 
particular species might cease to be advantageously cultivated 
where they had once been easily reared.* 

some cases, these tracts compose basins apparently scarcely at all exposed 
to any local influence ifl the way of percolation or infiltration of water 
toward or from neighboring valleys. But in such situations, apart from 
accidental disturbances, the ground is growing drier and drier, from year 
to year, springs are still disappearing, and rivulets still diminishing in their 
summer supply of water. A probable explanation of this is to be found 
in the rapid drainage of the surface of cleared ground, which prevents the 
subterranean natural reservoirs, whether cavities or merely strata of bib¬ 
ulous earth, from filling up. How long this process is to last before an 
equilibrium is reached, none can say. It may be, for years ; it may be, for 
centuries. 

Livingstone states facts which favor the supposition that a secular 
desiccation is still going on in central Africa. When the regions where 
the earth is growing drier were cleared of wood, or, indeed, whether 
forests ever grew there, we are unable to say, but the change appears to 
have been long in progress. There is reason to suspect a similar revolution 
in Arabia Petrosa. In many of the wadis, and particularly in the gorges 
between Wadi Feiran and Wadi Esh Sheikh, there are water-worn banks 
showing that, at no very remote period, the winter floods must have risen 
fifty feet in channels where the growth of acacias and tamarisks and the 
testimony of the Arabs concur to prove that they have not risen six feet 
within the memory or tradition of the present inhabitants. Theie is little 
probability that any considerable part of the Sinaitic peninsula has been 
wooded since its first occupation by man, and we must seek the cause of 
its increasing dryness elsewhere than in the removal of the xoiest. 

* The soil of newly subdued countries is generally in a high degree 


22 


UNCERTAINTY OF METEOROLOGY. 


We are very imperfectly acquainted with the present mean 
and extreme temperature, or the precipitation and the evap¬ 
oration of any extensive region, even in countries most densely 
peopled and best supplied with instruments and observers. 
The progress of science is constantly detecting errors of method 
in older observations, and many laboriously constructed tables 
of meteorological phenomena are now thrown aside as falla¬ 
cious, and therefore worse than useless, because some condition 
necessary to secure accuracy of result was neglected, in obtain¬ 
ing the data on which they were founded. 

To take a familiar instance: it is but recently that atten¬ 
tion has been drawn to the great influence of slight changes of 

favorable to the growth of the fruits of the garden and the orchard, but 
usually becomes much less so in a very few years. Plums, of many varie¬ 
ties, were formerly grown, in great perfection and abundance, in many 
parts of New England where at present they can scarcely be reared at all; 
and the peach, which, a generation or two ago, succeeded admirably in the 
southern portion of the same States, has almost ceased to be cultivated 
there. The disappearance of these fruits is partly due to the ravages of 
insects, which have in later years attacked them ; but this is evidently by 
no means the sole, or even the principal cause of their decay. In these 
cases, it is not to the exhaustion of the particular acres on which the fruit 
trees have grown that we are to ascribe their degeneracy, but to a general 
change in the condition of the soil or the air ; for it is equally impossible 
to rear them successfully on absolutely new land in the neighborhood of 
grounds where, not long since, they bore the finest fruit. 

I remember being told, many years ago, by one of the earliest settlers 
of the State of Ohio, a very intelligent and observing person, that the 
apple trees raised there from seed sown soon after the land was cleared, 
bore fruit in less than half the time required to bring to bearing those 
reared from seed sown when the ground had been twenty years under cul¬ 
tivation. 

In the peat mosses of Denmark, Scotch firs and other trees not now 
growing in the same localities, are found in abundance. Every generation 
of trees leaves the soil in a different state from that in which it found it; 
every tree that springs up in a group of trees of another species than its 
own, grows under different influences of light and shade and atmosphere 
from its predecessors. Hence the succession of crops, which occurs in all 
natural forests, seems to be due rather to changes of condition than of cli¬ 
mate. See chapter iii, post. 





UNCERTAINTY OF METEOROLOGY. 


23 


station upon the results of observations of temperature and 
precipitation. A thermometer removed but a few hundred 
yards from its first position differs not unfrequently five, some¬ 
times even ten degrees in its readings ; and when we are told 
that the annual fall of rain on the roof of the observatory at 
Paris is two inches less than on the ground by the side of it, 
w r e may see that the level of the rain-gauge is a point of much 
consequence in making estimates from its measurements. The 
data from which results have been deduced with respect to 
the hygrometrical and thermometrical conditions, the climate 
in short, of different countries, have very often been derived 
from observations at single points in cities or districts separated 
by considerable distances. The tendency of errors and acci¬ 
dents to balance each other authorizes us, indeed, to entertain 
greater confidence than we could otherwise feel in the conclu¬ 
sions drawn from such tables; but it is in the highest degree 
probable that they would be much modified by more numer¬ 
ous series of observations, at different stations within narrow 
limits.* 

* The nomenclature of meteorology is vague and sometimes equivocal. 
Not long since, it was suspected that the observers reporting to a scientific 
institution did not agree in their understanding of the mode of expressing 
the direction of the wind prescribed by their instructions. It was found, 
upon inquiry, that very many of them used the names of the compass- 
points to indicate the quarter from which the wind blew, while others 
employed them to signify the quarter toward which the atmospheric cur¬ 
rents were moving. In some instances, the observers were no longer 
within the reach of inquiry, and of course their tables of the wind were of 
no value. 

“ Winds,” says Mrs. Somerville, “ are named from the points whence 
they blow, currents exactly the reverse. An easterly wind comes from 
the east; whereas an easterly current comes from the west, and flows 
toward the east .”—Physical Geography, p. 229. 

There is no philological ground for this distinction, and it probably 
originated in a confusion of the terminations -wardly and - erly , both of 
which are modern. The root of the former ending implies the direction 
to or to-ward which motion is supposed. It corresponds to, and is prob¬ 
ably a 1 lied with, the Latin versus. The termination -erly is a corruption 
or softening of - ernly , easterly for easternly, and many authors of the sev- 


24 


PRECIPITATION AND EVAPORATION. 


There is one branch of research which is of the utmost 
importance in reference to these questions, but which, from 
the great difficulty of direct observation upon it, has been less 
successfully studied than almost any other problem of physi¬ 
cal science. I refer to the proportions between precipitation, 
superficial drainage, absorption, and evaporation. Precise 
actual measurement of these quantities upon even a single acre 
of ground is impossible ; and in all cabinet experiments on the 
subject, the conditions of the surface observed are so different 
from those which occur in nature, that we cannot safely reason 
from one case to the other. In nature, the inclination of the 
ground, the degree of freedom or obstruction of the surface, 
the composition and density of the soil, upon which its permea¬ 
bility by water and its power of absorbing and retaining or 
transmitting moisture depend, its temperature, the dryness or 
saturation of the subsoil, vary at comparatively short distances ; 
and though the precipitation upon and the superficial flow 
from very small geographical basins may be estimated with an 

enteenth century so write it. In Hakluyt (i, p. 2), easterly is applied to 
place, “ easterly bounds,” and means eastern. In a passage in Drayton, 
“ easterly winds ” must mean winds from the east; but the same author, in 
speaking of nations, uses northerly for northern. Hakewell says: “ The 
sonne cannot goe more southernely from vs, nor come more northernely 
towards vs.” Holland, in his translation of Pliny, referring to the moon, 
has : “ When shee is northerly ,” and “ shee is gone southerly .” Kichard- 
son, to whom I am indebted for the above citations, quotes a passage from 
Dampier where westerly is applied to the wind, but the context does not 
determine the direction. The only example of the termination in -wardly 
given by this lexicographer is from Donne, where it means toward the 
west. 

Shakspeare, in Hamlet (v. ii), uses northerly wind for wind from the 
north. Milton does not employ either of these terminations, nor were 
they known to the Anglo-Saxons, who, however, had adjectives of direc¬ 
tion in -an or -en, ern and - weard , the last always meaning the point 
toward which motion is supposed, the others that from which it pro¬ 
ceeds. 

M e use an east wind, an eastern wind, and an easterly wind, to signify 
the same thing. The two former expressions are old, and constant in mean¬ 
ing ; the last is recent, superfluous, and equivocal. 


I 


EFFECTS OF HTJMAN ACTION ASCERTAINABLE. 25 

approach to precision, yet even here we have no present means 
of knowing how much of the water absorbed by the earth is 
restored to the atmosphere by evaporation, and how much 
carried off by infiltration or other modes of underground 
discharge. When, therefore, we attempt to use the phe¬ 
nomena observed on a few square or cubic yards of earth, as a 
basis of reasoning upon the meteorology of a province, it is 
evident that our data must be insufficient to warrant positive 
general conclusions. In discussing the climatology of whole 
countries, or even of comparatively small local divisions, we 
may safely say that none can tell what percentage of the 
water they receive from the atmosphere is evaporated ; what 
absorbed by the ground and conveyed off* by subterranean 
conduits; what carried down to the sea by superficial chan¬ 
nels ; what drawn from the earth or the air by a given extent 
of forest, of short pasture vegetation, or of tall meadow-grass ; 
what given out again by surfaces so covered, or by bare 
ground of various textures and composition, under different 
conditions of atmospheric temperature, pressure, and humid¬ 
ity ; or what is the amount of evaporation from water, ice, or 
snow, under the varying exposures to which, in actual nature, 
they are constantly subjected. If, then, we are so ignorant of 
all these climatic phenomena in the best-known regions inhab¬ 
ited by man, it is evident that we can rely little upon theo¬ 
retical deductions applied to the former more natural state of 
the same regions—less still to such as are adopted with respect 
to distant, strange, and primitive countries. 


Mechanical Effects produced by Man on the Surface of the 
Earth more easily ascertainable. 

In investigating the mechanical effects of human action on 
superficial geography, we are treading on safer ground, and 
dealing with much less subtile phenomena, less intractable 
elements. Great physical changes can, in some cases, be posi¬ 
tively shown, in some almost certainly inferred, to have been 
produced by the operations of rural industry, and by the labors 


26 


POSSIBILITY OF RESTORATION. 


of man in other spheres of material effort; and hence, in this 
most important part of our subject, we can arrive at many 
positive generalizations, and obtain practical results of no 
small economical value. 


Importance and Possibility of Physical Pestoration. 

Many circumstances conspire to invest with great present 
interest the questions : how far man can permanently modify 
and ameliorate those physical conditions of terrestrial surface 
and climate on which his material welfare depends; how far 
he can compensate, arrest, or retard the deterioration which 
many of his agricultural and industrial processes tend to pro¬ 
duce ; and how far he can restore fertility and salubrity to soils 
which his follies or his crimes have made barren or pestilential. 
Among these circumstances, the most prominent, perhaps, is 
the necessity of providing new homes for a European popula¬ 
tion which is increasing more rapidly than its means of subsist¬ 
ence, new physical comforts for classes of the people that have 
now become too much enlightened and have imbibed too 
much culture to submit to a longer deprivation of a share in 
the material enjoyments which the privileged ranks have hith¬ 
erto monopolized. 

To supply new hives for the emigrant swarms, there are, 
first, the vast unoccupied prairies and forests of America, 
of Australia, and of many other great oceanic islands, the 
sparsely inhabited and still unexhausted soils of Southern and 
even Central Africa, and, finally, the impoverished and half- 
depopulated shores of the Mediterranean, and the interior of 
Asia Minor and the farther East. To furnish to those who 
shall remain after emigration shall have conveniently reduced 
the too dense population of many European states, those 
means of sensuous and of intellectual well-being which are 
styled “ artificial wants ” when demanded by the humble and 
the poor, bat are admitted to be “ necessaries ” when claimed 
by the noble and the rich, the soil must be stimulated to its 
highest powers of production, and man’s utmost ingenuity and 


STABILITY OF NATURE. 


27 


energy must be tasked to renovate a nature drained, by liis 
improvidence, of fountains which a wise economy would have 
made plenteous and perennial sources of beauty, health, and 
wealth. 

In those yet virgin lands which the progress of modern 
discovery in both hemispheres has brought and is still bring¬ 
ing to the knowledge and control of civilized man, not much 
improvement of great physical conditions is to be looked for. 
The proportion of forest is indeed to be considerably reduced, 
superfluous waters to be drawn off, and routes of internal 
communication to be constructed ; but the primitive geograph¬ 
ical and climatic features of these countries ought to be, as far 
as possible, retained. 

Stability of Nature. 

Nature, left undisturbed, so fashions her territory as to give 
it almost unchanging permanence of form, outline, and pro¬ 
portion, except when shattered by geologic convulsions; and 
in these comparatively rare cases of derangement, she sets 
herself at once to repair the superficial damage, and to restore, 
as nearly as practicable, the former aspect of her dominion. 
In new countries, the natural inclination of the ground, the 
self-formed slopes and levels, are generally such as best secure 
the stability of the soil. They have been graded and lowered 
or elevated by frost and chemical forces and gravitation and 
the flow of water and vegetable deposit and the action of 
the winds, until, by a general compensation of conflicting 
forces, a condition of equilibrium has been reached which, 
without the action of man, would remain, with little fluctua¬ 
tion, for countless ages. 

We need not go far back to reach a period when, in all 
that portion of the North American continent which has been 
occupied by British colonization, the geographical elements 
very nearly balanced and compensated each other. At the 
commencement of the seventeenth century, the soil, with 
insignificant exceptions, was covered with forests; * and 

* I do not here speak of the vast prairie region of the Mississippi val- 


28 


AMERICAN FORESTS. 


whenever the Indian, in consequence of war or the exhaustion 
of the beasts of the chase, abandoned the narrow fields he bad 
planted and the woods he had burned over, they speedily 
returned,by a succession of herbaceous, arborescent, and arbo¬ 
real growths, to their original state. Even a single generation 
sufficed to restore them almost to their primitive luxuriance 
of forest vegetation.* The unbroken forests had attained to 
their maximum density and strength of growth, and, as the 
older trees decayed and fell, they were succeeded by new 
shoots or seedlings, so that from century to century no per¬ 
ceptible change seems to have occurred in the wood, except 
the slow, spontaneous succession of crops. This succession 
involved no interruption of growth, and but little break in 
the “ boundless contiguity of shade; ” for, in the husbandry 
of nature, there are no fallows. Trees fall singly, not by 
square roods, and the tall pine is hardly prostrate, before the 
light and heat, admitted to the ground by the removal of the 
dense crown of foliage which had shut them out, stimulate the 
germination of the seeds of broad-leaved trees that had lain, 
waiting this kindly influence, perhaps for centuries. Two 
natural causes, destructive in character, were, indeed, in 
operation in the primitive American forests, though, in the 
Northern colonies, at least, there were sufficient compensa¬ 
tions ; for we do not discover that any considerable permanent 
change was produced by them. I refer to the action of 

ley, which cannot properly be said ever to have been a field of British 
colonization; but of the original colonies, and their dependencies in the 
territory of the present United States, and in Canada. It is, however, 
equally true of the Western prairies as of the Eastern forest land, that they 
had arrived at a state of equilibrium, though under very different condi¬ 
tions. 

* The great fire of Miramichi in 1825, probably the most extensive and 
terrific conflagration recorded in authentic history, spread its ravages over 
nearly six thousand square miles, chiefly of woodland, and was of such 
intensity that it seemed to consume the very soil itself. But so great are 
the recuperative powers of nature, that, in twenty-five years, the ground 
was thickly covered again with trees of fair dimensions, except where cul¬ 
tivation and pasturage kept down the forest growth. 



AMERICAN FORESTS. 


29 


beavers and of fallen trees in producing bogs,* and of smaller 
animals, insects, and birds, in destroying the woods. Bogs 
are less numerous and extensive in the Northern States of the 
American union, because the natural inclination of the surface 
favors drainage; but they are more frequent, and cover more 
ground, in the Southern States, for the opposite reason.f 

* The English nomenclature of this geographical feature does not seem 
well settled. We have bog, swamp, marsh, morass, moor, fen, turf moss, 
peat moss , quagmire , all of which, though sometimes more or less accu¬ 
rately discriminated, are often used interchangeably, or are perhaps em¬ 
ployed, each exclusively, in a particular district. In Sweden, where, 
especially in the Lappish provinces, this terr-aqueous formation is very ex¬ 
tensive and important, the names of its different kinds are more specific 
in their application. The general designation of all soils permanently 
pervaded with water is Karr. The elder Lsestadius divides the Karr 
into two genera: Myror (sing, myra ), and Mossar (sing, mosse ). “ The 

former,” he observes, “are grass-grown, and overflowed with water 
through almost the whole summer; the latter are covered with mosses 
and always moist, but very seldom overflowed.” He enumerates the 
following species of Myra, the character of which will perhaps be suffi¬ 
ciently understood by the Latin terms into which he translates the ver¬ 
nacular names, for the benefit of strangers not altogether familiar with the 
language and the subject: 1. Komyror, paludes graminosae. 2. By, pa- 
ludes profundas. 3. Flarhmyror , or proper hdrr, paludes limosoQ. 4. 
Fjdllmyror, paludes uliginosae. 5. Tufmyror, paludes casspitosas. 6. Bis - 
myror , paludes virgatso. 7. Starrdngar, prata irrigata, with their subdi¬ 
visions, dry starrdngar or risdngar , wet starrdngar and frdhengropar. 8. 
Polar, lacunae. 9. Golar, fossae inundatae. The Mossar , paludes turfosae, 
which are of great extent, have but two species: 1. Torfmossar, called 
also Mossmyror and Snottermyror, and, 2. Bjornmossar. 

The accumulations of stagnant or stagnating water originating in bogs 
are distinguished into Trash, stagna, and Tjernar or Tjdrnar (sing. Tjern 
or Tjdrn), stagnatiles. TrdsJc are pools fed by bogs, or water emanating 
from them, and their bottoms are slimy ; Tjernar are small Trash situated 
within the limits of Mossar.— L. L. Lujstadius, om Mojligheten af TJppod- 
lingar i Lappmarhen, pp. 23, 24. 

t Although the quantity of bog land in Hew England is less than in 
many other regions of equal area, yet there is a considerable extent of this 
formation in some of the Northeastern States. Dana {Manual of Geology , 
p. 614) states that the quantity of peat in Massachusetts is estimated at 
120,000,000 cords, or nearly 569,000,000 cubic yards, but he does not give 



30 


FORMATION OF BOGS. 


They generally originate in tlie checking of watercourses by 
the falling of timber, or of earth and rocks, across their chan¬ 
nels. If the impediment thus created is sufficient to retain a 
permanent accumulation of water behind it, the trees whose 
roots are overflowed soon perish, and then by their fall 
increase the obstruction, and, of course, occasion a still wider 
spread of the stagnating stream. This process goes on until 
the water finds a new outlet, at a higher level, not liable to 
similar interruption. The fallen trees not completely covered 
by water are soon overgrown with mosses; aquatic and semi- 
aquatic plants propagate themselves, and spread until they 
more or less completely fill up the space occupied by the 
water, and the surface is gradually converted from a pond to a 
quaking morass.* The morass is slowly solidified by vegetable 

either the area or the depth of the deposit. In any event, however, hogs 
cover hut a small percentage of the territory in any of the Northern States, 
while it is said that one tenth of the whole surface of Ireland is composed 
of bogs, and there are still extensive tracts of undrained marsh in England. 

Bogs, independently of their importance in geology as explaining the 
origin of some kinds of mineral coal, have a present value as repositories 
of fuel. Peat beds have sometimes a thickness of ten or twelve yards, or 
even more. A depth of ten yards would give 48,000 cuhio yards to the 
acre. The greatest quantity of firewood yielded by the forests of New 
England to the acre is 100 cords solid measure, or 474 cubic yards; but 
this comprises only the trunks and larger branches. If we add the small 
branches and twigs, it is possible that 600 cubic yards might, in some cases, 
be cut on an acre. This is only one eightieth part of the quantity of 
peat sometimes found on the same area. It is true that a yard of peat and 
a yard of wood are not the equivalents of each other, but the fuel on an 
acre of deep peat is worth much more than that on an acre of the best 
woodland. Besides this, wood is perishable, and the quantity on an acre 
cannot be increased beyond the amount just stated; peat is indestructible, 
and the beds are always growing. 

* “ Aquatic plants have a utility in raising the level of marshy grounds, 
which renders them very valuable, and may well be called a geological 
function. * * * 

“ The engineer drains ponds at a great expense by lowering the surface 
of the water; nature attains the same end, gratuitously, by raising the 
level of the soil without depressing that of the water; but she proceeds 
more slowly. There are, in the Landes, marshes where this natural filling 


BEAVER DAMS-FORMATION OF BOGS. 


31 


production and deposit, then very often restored to the forest 
condition by the growth of black ashes, cedars, or, in southern 
latitudes, cypresses, and other trees suited to such a soil, and 
thus the interrupted harmony of nature is at last reestablished. 

I am disposed to think that more bogs in the Northern 
States owe their origin to beavers than to accidental obstruc¬ 
tions of rivulets by wind-fallen or naturally decayed trees ; for 
there are few swamps in those States, at the outlets of which 
we may not, by careful search, find the remains of a beaver 
dam. The beaver sometimes inhabits natural lakelets, but he 
prefers to owe his pond to his own ingenuity and toil. The 
reservoir once constructed, its inhabitants rapidly multiply, 
and as its harvests of pond lilies, and other aquatic plants on 
which this quadruped feeds in winter, become too small for 
the growing population, the beaver metropolis sends out 
expeditions of discovery and colonization. The pond grad¬ 
ually fills up, by the operation of the same causes as when it 
owes its existence to an accidental obstruction, and when, at 
last, the original settlement is converted into a bog by the 
usual processes of vegetable life, the remaining inhabitants 
abandon it and build on some virgin brooklet a new city of 
the waters. 

In countries somewhat further advanced in civilization 
than those occupied by the North American Indians, as in 
mediaeval Ireland, the formation of bogs may be commenced 
by the neglect of man to remove, from the natural channels 
of superficial drainage, the tops and branches of trees felled 

has a thickness of four metres, and some of them, at first lower than 
the sea, have been thus raised and drained so as to grow summer crops, 
such, for example, as maize.”— Boitel, Mise en valeur des Torres pauvres , 
p. 227. 

The bogs of Denmark—the examination of which by Steenstrup and 
Yaupell has presented such curious results with respect to the natural suc¬ 
cession of forest trees—appear to have gone through this gradual process 
of drying, and the birch, which grows freely in very wet soils, has con¬ 
tributed very effectually by its annual deposits to raise the surface above 
the water level, and thus to prepare the ground for the oak.— Vaupell, 
Bogens Indvandring, pp. 89, 40. 



82 


SMALL QUADRUPEDS AND INSECTS. 


for the various purposes to which wood is applicable in his 
rude industry; and, when the flow of the water is thus 
checked, nature goes on with the processes I have already 
described. In such half-civilized regions, too, windfalls are 
more frequent than in those where the forest is unbroken, 
because, when openings have been made in it, for agricultural 
or other purposes, the entrance thus afforded to the wind 
occasions the sudden overthrow of hundreds of trees which 
might otherwise have stood for generations, and thus have 
fallen to the ground, only one by one, as natural decay 
brought them down.* Besides this, the flocks bred by man in 
the pastoral state, keep down the incipient growth of trees on 
the half-dried bogs, and prevent them from recovering their 
primitive condition. 

Young trees in the native forest are sometimes girdled and 
killed by the smaller rodent quadrupeds, and their growth is 
checked by birds which feed on the terminal bud; but these 
animals, as we shall see, are generally found on the skirts of 
the wood only, not in its deeper recesses, and hence the mis¬ 
chief they do is not extensive. The insects which damage 
primitive forests by feeding upon products of trees essential to 
their growth, are not numerous, nor is their appearance, in 
destructive numbers, frequent; and those which perforate the 
stems and branches, to deposit and hatch their eggs, more 
commonly select dead trees for that purpose, though, unhap¬ 
pily, there are important exceptions to this latter remark.f I 

* Careful examination of the peat mosses in North Sjaelland—which 
are so abundant in fossil wood that, within thirty years, they have yielded 
above a million of trees—shows that the trees have generally fallen from 
age and not from wind. They are found in depressions, on the declivities 
of which they grew, and they lie with the top lowest, always falling 
toward the bottom of the valley.— Vaupell, Bogens Indvandring i de 
BansTce Shove , pp. 10,14. 

t The locust insect, Clitus pictus , which deposits its eggs in the Ameri¬ 
can locust, Robinia pseudacacia , is one of these, and its ravages have been 
and still are most destructive to that very valuable tree, so remarkable for 
combining rapidity of growth with strength and durability of wood. This 
insect, I believe, has not yet appeared in Europe, where, since the so gen- 


INJURIOUS INSECTS. 


33 


do not know that we have any evidence of the destruction or 
serious injury of American forests by insects, before or even 
soon after the period of colonization ; but since the white man 
has laid bare a vast proportion of the earth’s surface, and 
thereby produced changes favorable, perhaps, to the multipli¬ 
cation of these pests, they have greatly increased in numbers, 
and, apparently, in voracity also. Not many years ago, the 
pines on thousands of acres of land in North Carolina, were 
destroyed by insects not known to have ever done serious 
injury to that tree before. In such cases as this and others of 
the like sort, there is good reason to believe that man is the 
indirect cause of an evil for which he pays so heavy a penalty. 
Insects increase whenever the birds which feed upon them 
disappear. Hence, in the wanton destruction of the robin and 
other insectivorous birds, the bipes implumis , the featherless 
biped, man, is not only exchanging the vocal orchestra which 
greets the rising sun for the drowsy beetle’s evening drone, 
and depriving his groves and his fields of their fairest orna¬ 
ment, but he is waging a treacherous warfare on his natural 
allies.* 

eral employment of the Robinia to clothe and protect embankments and 
the scarps of deep cuts on railroads, it would do incalculable mischief. As 
a traveller, however, I should find some compensation for this evil in the 
destruction of these acacia hedges, which as completely obstruct the view 
on hundreds of miles of French and Italian railways, as the garden -walls 
of the same countries do on the ordinary roads. 

* In the artificial woods of Europe, insects are far more numerous and 
destructive to trees than in the primitive forests of America, and the same 
remark may be made of the smaller rodents, such as moles, mice, and 
squirrels. In the dense native wood, the ground and the air are too 
humid, the depth of shade too great for many tribes of these creatures, 
while near the natural meadows and other open grounds, where circum¬ 
stances are otherwise more favorable for their existence and multiplica¬ 
tion, their numbers are kept down by birds, serpents, foxes, and smaller 
predacious quadrupeds. In civilized countries, these natural enemies of 
the worm, the beetle and the mole, are persecuted, sometimes almost ex¬ 
terminated, by man, who also removes from his plantations the decayed 
or wind-fallen trees, the shrubs and underwood, which, in a state of 
nature, furnished food and shelter to the borer and the rodent, and often 
3 


34 


STABILITY OF NATURE. 


In fine, in countries untrodden by man, the proportions 
and relative positions of land and water, the atmospheric 
precipitation and evaporation, the thermometric mean, and 
the distribution of vegetable and animal life, are subject to 
change only from geological influences so slow in their opera¬ 
tion that the geographical conditions may be regarded as 
constant and immutable. These arrangements of nature it is, 
in most cases, highly desirable substantially to maintain, when 
such regions become the seat of organized commonwealths. 
It is, therefore, a matter of the first importance, that, in 
commencing the process of fitting them for permanent civil¬ 
ized occupation, the transforming operations should be so con¬ 
ducted as not unnecessarily to derange and destroy what, in too 
many cases, it is beyond the power of man to rectify or restore. 

also to the animals that preyed upon them. Hence the insect and the 
gnawing quadruped are allowed to increase, from the expulsion of the 
police which, in the natural wood, prevent their excessive multiplication, 
and they become destructive to the forest because they are driven to the 
living tree for nutriment and cover. The forest of Fontainebleau is almost 
wholly without birds, and their absence is ascribed by some writers to 
the want of water, which, in the thirsty sands of that wood, does not 
gather into running brooks; but the want of undergrowth is perhaps 
an equally good reason for their scarcity. In a wood of spontaneous 
growth, ordered and governed by nature, the squirrel does not attack 
trees, or at least the injury he may do is too trifling to be perceptible, but 
he is a formidable enemy to the plantation. “ The squirrels bite the cones 
of the pine and consume the seed which might serve to restock the wood; 
they do still more mischief by gnawing off, near the leading shoot, a strip 
of bark, and thus often completely girdling the tree. Trees so injured 
must be felled, as they would never acquire a vigorous growth. The 
squirrel is especially destructive to the pine in Sologne, where he gnaws 
the hark of trees twenty or twenty-five years old.” But even here, nature 
sometimes provides a compensation, by making the appetite of this quad¬ 
ruped serve to prevent an excessive production of seed cones, which tends 
to obstruct the due growth of the leading shoot. “ In some of the pineries 
of Brittany which produce cones so abundantly as to strangle the develop¬ 
ment of the leading shoot of the maritime pine, it has been observed that 
the pines are most vigorous where the squirrels are most numerous, a result 
attributed to the repression of the cones by this rodent.”— Boitel, Mise en 
valeur des Terres pauvres , p. 50. 


PHYSICAL IMPROVEMENT—DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 


35 


Restoration of Disturbed Harmonies . 

In reclaiming and reoccupying lands laid waste by human 
improvidence or malice, and abandoned by man, or occupied 
only by a nomade or thinly scattered population, the task of 
the pioneer settler is of a very different character. He is to 
become a co-worker with nature in the reconstruction of the 
damaged fabric which the negligence or the wantonness of 
former lodgers has rendered untenantable. He must aid her 
in reclothing the mountain slopes with forests and vegetable 
mould, thereby restoring the fountains which she provided to 
water them ; in checking the devastating fury of torrents, and 
bringing back the surface drainage to its primitive narrow 
channels; and in drying deadly morasses by opening the 
natural sluices which have been choked up, and cutting new 
canals for drawing off their stagnant waters. He must thus, 
on the one hand, create new reservoirs, and, on the other, 
remove mischievous accumulations of moisture, thereby equal¬ 
izing and regulating the sources of atmospheric humidity and 
of flowing water, both which are so essential to all vegetable 
growth, and, of course, to human and lower animal life. 

Destructiveness of Man. 

Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to 
him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profli¬ 
gate waste. Nature has provided against the absolute destruc¬ 
tion of any of her elementary matter, the raw material of her 
works ; the thunderbolt and the tornado, the most convulsive 
throes of even the volcano and the earthquake, being only 
phenomena of decomposition and recomposition. But she has 
left it within the power of man irreparably to derange the 
combinations of inorganic matter and of organic life, which 
through the night of aeons she had been proportioning and 
balancing, to prepare the earth for his habitation, when, in the 
fulness of time, his Creator should call him forth to enter into 
its possession. 

Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and 


36 


DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 


the inorganic world are, as I have remarked, bound together 
by such mutual relations and adaptations as secure, if not the 
absolute* permanence and equilibrium of both, a long contin¬ 
uance of the established conditions of each at any given time 
and place, or at least, a very slow and gradual succession of 
changes in those conditions. But man is everywhere a dis¬ 
turbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of 
nature are turned to discords. The proportions and accom¬ 
modations which insured the stability of existing arrange¬ 
ments are overthrown. Indigenous vegetable and animal 
species are extirpated, and supplanted by others of foreign 
origin, spontaneous production is forbidden or restricted, and 
the face of the earth is either laid bare or covered with a new 
and reluctant growth of vegetable forms, and with alien tribes 
of animal life. These intentional changes and substitutions 
constitute, indeed, great revolutions; but vast as is their 
magnitude and importance, they are, as we shall see, insig¬ 
nificant in comparison with the contingent and unsought 
results which have flowed from them. 

The fact that, of all organic beings, man alone is to be 
regarded as essentially a destructive power, and that he wields 
energies to resist which, nature—that nature whom all 
material life and all inorganic substance obey—is wholly 
impotent, tends to prove that, though living in physical 
nature, he is not of her, that he is of more exalted parentage, 
and belongs to a higher order of existences than those born of 
her womb and submissive to her dictates. 

There are, indeed, brute destroyers, beasts and birds and 
insects of prey—all animal life feeds upon, and, of course, 
destroys other life,—but this destruction is balanced by com¬ 
pensations. It is, in fact, the very means by which the exist¬ 
ence of one tribe of animals or of vegetables is secured against 
being smothered by the encroachments of another; and the 
reproductive powers of species, which serve as the food of 
others, are always proportioned to the demand they are 
destined to supply. Man pursues his victims with reckless 
destructiveness; and, while the sacrifice of life by the lower 


DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 


37 


animals is limited by the cravings of appetite, he unsparingly 
persecutes, even to extirpation, thousands of organic forms 
which he cannot consume.* 

* The terrible destructiveness of man is remarkably exemplified in the 
chase of large mammalia and birds for single products, attended with the 
entire waste of enormous quantities of flesh, and of other parts of the ani¬ 
mal, which are capable of valuable uses. The wild cattle of South America 
are slaughtered by millions for their hides and horns ; the buffalo of North 
America for his skin or his tongue; the elephant, the walrus, and the 
narwhal for their tusks; the cetacea, and some other marine animals, for 
their oil and whalebone ; the ostrich and other large birds, for their 
plumage. Within a few years, sheep have been killed in New England by 
whole flocks, for their pelts and suet alone, the flesh being thrown away; 
and it is even said that the bodies of the same quadrupeds have been used 
in Australia as fuel for limekilns. What a vast amount of human nutri¬ 
ment, of bone, and of other animal products valuable in the arts, is thus 
recklessly squandered! In nearly all these cases, the part which consti¬ 
tutes the motive for this wholesale destruction, and is alone saved, is 
essentially of insignificant value as compared with what is thrown away. 
The horns and hide of an ox are not economically worth a tenth part as 
much as the entire carcass. 

One of the greatest benefits to be expected from the improvements of 
civilization is, that increased facilities of communication will render it pos¬ 
sible to transport to places of consumption much valuable material that is 
now wasted because the price at the nearest market will not pay freight. 
The cattle slaughtered in South America for their hides would feed mil¬ 
lions of the starving population of the Old World, if their flesh could be 
economically preserved and transported across the ocean. 

We are beginning to learn a better economy in dealing with the inor¬ 
ganic world. The utilization—or, as the Germans more happily call it, 
the Verwerthung, the leworthing —of waste from metallurgical, chemical, 
and manufacturing establishments, is among the most important results of 
the application of science to industrial purposes. The incidental products 
from the laboratories of manufacturing chemists often become more valua¬ 
ble than those for the preparation of which they were erected. The slags 
from silver refineries, and even from smelting houses of the coarser metals, 
have not unfrequently yielded to a second operator a better 1 eturn than 
the first had derived from dealing with the natural ore; and the saving of 
lead carried off in the smoke of furnaces has, of itself, given a large profit 
on the capital invested in the works. A few years ago, an officer of an 
American mint was charged with embezzling gold committed to him for 
coinage. He insisted, in his detence, that much of the metal was \ola- 


38 


DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 


The earth was not, in its natural condition, completely 
adapted to the use of man, but only to the sustenance of wild 
animals and wild vegetation. These live, multiply their kind 
in just proportion, and attain their perfect measure ot strength 
and beauty, without producing or requiring any change in the 
natural arrangements of surface, or in each other’s spontaneous 
tendencies, except such mutual repression of excessive increase 
as may prevent the extirpation of one species by the encroach¬ 
ments of another. In short, without man, lower animal and 
spontaneous vegetable life would have been constant in type, 
distribution, and proportion, and the physical geography of the 
earth would have remained undisturbed for indefinite periods, 
and been subject to revolution only from possible, unknown 
cosmical causes, or from geological action. 

But man, the domestic animals that serve him, the field 
and garden plants the products of which supply him with 
food and clothing, cannot subsist and rise to the full devel¬ 
opment of their higher properties, unless brute and uncon¬ 
scious nature be effectually combated, and, in a great degree, 
vanquished by human art. Hence, a certain measure of trans¬ 
formation of terrestrial surface, of suppression of natural, and 
stimulation of artificially modified productivity becomes neces¬ 
sary. This measure man has unfortunately exceeded. He has 
felled the forests whose network of fibrous roots bound the 
mould to the rocky skeleton of the earth ; but had he allowed 
here and there a belt of woodland to reproduce itself by spon¬ 
taneous propagation, most of the mischiefs which his reckless 
destruction of the natural protection of the soil has occasioned 
would have been averted. He has broken up the mountain 
reservoirs, the percolation of whose waters through unseen 
channels supplied the fountains that refreshed his cattle and 
fertilized his fields; but he has neglected to maintain the 
cisterns and the canals of irrigation which a wise antiquity 

tilized and lost in refining and melting, and upon scraping the chimneys 
of the melting furnaces and the roofs of the adjacent houses, gold enough 
was found in the soot to account for no small part of the deficiency. 


DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 


39 


liad constructed to neutralize the consequences of its own 
imprudence. While he has torn the thin glebe which confined 
the light earth of extensive plains, and has destroyed the fringe 
of semi-aquatic plants which skirted the coast and checked 
the drifting of the sea sand, he has failed to prevent the 
spreading of the dunes by clothing them with artificially 
propagated vegetation. He has ruthlessly warred on all the 
tribes of animated nature whose spoil he could convert to his 
own uses, and he has not protected the birds which prey on 
the insects most destructive to his own harvests. 

Purely untutored humanity, it is true, interferes compara¬ 
tively little with the arrangements of nature,* and the destruc- 

* It is an interesting and not hitherto sufficiently noticed fact, that the 
domestication of the organic world, so far as it has yet been achieved, be¬ 
longs, not indeed to the savage state, but to the earliest dawn of civilization, 
the conquest of inorganic nature almost as exclusively to the most advanced 
stages of artificial culture. It is familiarly known to all who have occupied 
themselves with the psychology and habits of the ruder races, and of per¬ 
sons with imperfectly developed intellects in civilized life, that although 
these humble tribes and individuals sacrifice, without scruple, the lives of 
the lower animals to the gratification of their appetites and the supply of 
their other physical wants, yet they nevertheless seem to cherish with 
brutes, and even with vegetable life, sympathies which are much more 
feebly felt by civilized men. The popular traditions of the simpler peoples 
recognize a certain community of nature between man, brute animals, and 
even plants; and this serves to explain why the apologue or fable, which 
ascribes the power of speech and the faculty of reason to birds, quadrupeds, 
insects, flowers, and trees, is one of the earliest forms of literary compo- 
siticn. 

In almost every wild tribe, some particular quadruped or bird, though 
persecuted as a destroyer of more domestic beasts, or hunted for food, is 
regarded with peculiar respect, one might almost say, affection. Some of 
the North American aboriginal nations celebrate a propitiatory feast to the 
manes of the intended victim before they commence a bear hunt; and the 
Norwegian peasantry have not only retained an old proverb which ascribes 
to the same animal u ti Mcends StyrJce og tolv Mcends Vid ,” ten men’s 
strength and twelve men’s cunning; but they still pay to him something 
of the reverence with which ancient superstition invested him. The 
student of Icelandic literature will find in the saga of Finnbogi Unn rami 
a curious illustration of this feeling, in an account of a dialogue botween a 


40 


DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 


tive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and 
unsparing as he advances in civilization, until the impoverish¬ 
ment, with which his exhaustion of the natural resources of 
the soil is threatening him, at last awakens him to the neces- 

Horwegian bear and an Icelandic champion—dumb show on the part of 
Bruin, and chivalric words on that of Einnbogi—followed by a duel, in 
which the latter, who had thrown away his arms and armor in order that 
the combatants might meet on equal terms, was victorious. Drummond 
Hay’s very interesting work on Morocco contains many amusing notices 
of a similar feeling entertained by the Moors toward the redoubtable 
enemy of their flocks—the lion. 

This sympathy helps us to understand how it is that most if not all 
the domestic animals—if indeed they ever existed in a wild state—were 
appropriated, reclaimed and trained before men had been gathered into 
organized and fixed communities, that almost every known esculent plant 
had acquired substantially its present artificial character, and that the 
properties of nearly all vegetable drugs and poisons were know r n at the 
remotest period to which historical records reach. Did nature bestow 
upon primitive man some instinct akin to that by which she teaches the 
brute to select the nutritious and to reject the noxious vegetables indis¬ 
criminately mixed in forest and pasture ? 

This instinct, it must be admitted, is far from infallible, and, as has 
been hundreds of times remarked by naturalists, it is in many cases not an 
original faculty but an acquired and transmitted habit. It is a fact familiar 
to persons engaged in sheep husbandry in Hew England—and I have seen 
it confirmed by personal observation—that sheep bred where the common 
laurel, as it is called, Kalmia angustifolia , abounds, almost always avoid 
browsing upon the leaves of that plant, while those brought from districts 
where laurel is unknown, and turned into pastures where it grows, very 
often feed upon it and are poisoned by it. A curious acquired and hered¬ 
itary instinct, of a different character, may not improperly be noticed here. 
I refer to that by which horses bred in provinces where quicksands are 
common avoid their dangers or extricate themselves from them. See 
Bkemontier, Memoire sur les Dunes , Annales des Ponts et Chausse.es, 1833 : 
•premier semestre , pp. 155-157. 

It is commonly said in Hew England, and I believe with reason, that 
the crows of this generation are wiser than their ancestors. Scarecrows 
which were effectual fifty years ago are no longer respected by the plun¬ 
derers of the cornfield, and new terrors must from time to time be invented 
for its protection. 

Civilization has added little to the number of vegetable or animal 
species grown in our fields or bred in our folds, while, on the contrary, 


CHARACTER OF MAN’S ACTION. 


41 


sity of preserving what is left, if not of restoring what has 
been wantonly wasted. The wandering savage grows no cul¬ 
tivated vegetable, fells no forest, and extirpates no useful 
plant, no noxious weed. If his skill in the chase enables him 
to entrap numbers of the animals on which he feeds, he com¬ 
pensates this loss by destroying also the lion, the tiger, the 
wolf, the otter, the seal, and the eagle, thus indirectly protect¬ 
ing the feebler quadrupeds and fish and fowls, which would 
otherwise become the booty of beasts and birds of prey. But 
with stationary life, or rather with the pastoral state, man at 
once commences an almost indiscriminate warfare upon all the 
forms of animal and vegetable existence around him, and as 
he advances in civilization, he gradually eradicates or trans¬ 
forms every spontaneous product of the soil he occupies.* 

Human and Brute Action Compared . 

It has been maintained by authorities as high as any 
known to modern science, that the action of man upon 
nature, though greater in degree , does not differ in kind, from 

the subjugation of the inorganic forces, and the consequent extension of 
man’s sway over, not the annual products of the earth only, but her sub¬ 
stance and her springs of action, is almost entirely the work of highly re¬ 
fined and cultivated ages. The employment of the elasticity of wood and 
of horn, as a projectile power in the bow, is nearly universal among the 
rudest savages. The application of compressed air to the same purpose, in 
the blowpipe, is more restricted, and the use of the mechanical powers, 
the inclined plane, the wheel and axle, and even the wedge and lever, 
seems almost unknown except to civilized man. I have myself seen Eu¬ 
ropean peasants to whom one of the simplest applications of this latter 
power was a revelation. 

* The difference between the relations of savage life, and of incipient 
civilization, to nature, is well seen in that part of the valley of the Missis¬ 
sippi which was once occupied by the mound builders and afterward by 
the far less developed Indian tribes. When the tillers of the fields which 
must have been cultivated to sustain the large population that once inhab¬ 
ited those regions perished or were driven out, the soil fell back to the 
normal forest state, and the savages who succeeded the more advanced 
race interfered very little, if at all, with the ordinary course of spon¬ 
taneous nature. 


42 


CHARACTER OF MAN’S ACTION. 


tliat of wild animals. It appears to me to (lifter in essential 
character, because, though it is often followed by unforeseen 
and undesired results, yet it is nevertheless guided by a self- 
conscious and intelligent will aiming as often at secondary and 
remote as at immediate objects. The wild animal, on the 
other hand, acts instinctively, and, so far as we are able to 
perceive, always with a view to single and direct purposes. 
The backwoodsman and the beaver alike fell trees; the man 
that he may convert the forest into an olive grove that will 
mature its fruit only for a succeeding generation, the beaver 
that he may feed upon their bark or use them in the construction 
of his habitation. Human differs from brute action, too, in its 
influence upon the material world, because it is not controlled 
by natural compensations and balances. Hatural arrange¬ 
ments, once disturbed by man, are not restored until he retires 
from the field, and leaves free scope to spontaneous recupera¬ 
tive energies ; the wounds he inflicts upon the material crea¬ 
tion are not healed until he withdraws the arm that gave the 
blow. On the other hand, I am not aware of any evidence 
that wild animals have ever destroyed the smallest forest, 
extirpated any organic species, or modified its natural charac¬ 
ter, occasioned any permanent change of terrestrial surface, or 
produced any disturbance of physical conditions which nature 
has not, of herself, repaired without the expulsion of the 
animal that had caused it.* 

The form of geographical surface, and very probably the 
climate of a given country, depend much on the character of 
the vegetable life belonging to it. Man has, by domestication, 
greatly changed the habits and properties of the plants he 
rears; he has, by voluntary selection, immensely modified the 
forms and qualities of the animated creatures that serve him ; 
and he has, at the same time, completely rooted out many 
forms of both vegetable and animal being.f Wliat is there, in 

* There is a possible—but only a possible—exception in the case of the 
American bison. See note on that subject in chap, iii, post. 

t Whatever may be thought of the modification of organic species by 
natural selection, there is certainly no evidence that animals have exerted 






PHYSICAL DECAY. 


43 


tlie influence of brute life, that corresponds to this ? We have 
no reason to believe that in that portion of the American 
continent which, though peopled by many tribes of quadruped 
and fowl, remained uninhabited by man, or only thinly occu¬ 
pied by purely savage tribes, any sensible geographical change 
had occurred within twenty centuries before the epoch of 
discovery and colonization, while, during the same period, 
man had changed millions of square miles, in the fairest and 
most fertile regions of the Old World, into the barrenest 
deserts. 

The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and 
destroy the balance which nature had established between her 
organized and her inorganic creations; and she avenges her¬ 
self upon the intruder, by letting loose upon her defaced 
provinces destructive energies hitherto kept in check by 
organic forces destined to be his best auxiliaries, but which he 
has unwisely dispersed and driven from the field of action. 
When the forest is gone, the great reservoir of moisture stored 
up in its vegetable mould is evaporated, and returns only in 
deluges of rain to wash away the parched dust into which that 
mould has been converted. The well-wooded and humid hills 
are turned to ridges of dry rock, which encumbers the low 
grounds and chokes the watercourses with its debris, and— 
except in countries favored with an equable distribution of 
rain through the seasons, and a moderate and regular inclina¬ 
tion of surface—the whole earth, unless rescued by human art 
from the physical degradation to which it tends, becomes an 
assemblage of bald mountains, of barren, turfless hills, and of 
swampy and malarious plains. There are parts of Asia Minor, 
of Northern Africa, of Greece, and even of Alpine Europe, 
where the operation of causes set in action by man has 
brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as com- 
plete as that of the moon ; and though, within that brief space 

upon any form of life an influence analogous to that of domestication upon 
plants, quadrupeds, and birds reared artificially by man; and this is as 
true of unforeseen as of purposely effected improvements accomplished by 
voluntary selection of breeding animals. 


44 


PHYSICAL IMPROVEMENT. 


of time which we call u the historical period,” they are known 
to have been covered with luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, 
and fertile meadows, they are now too far deteriorated to be 
reclaimable by man, nor can they become again fitted tor 
human use, except through great geological changes, or other 
mysterious influences or agencies of which we have no present 
knowledge, and over which we have no prospective control. 
The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhab¬ 
itant, and another era of equal human crime and human 
improvidence, and of like duration with that through which 
traces of that crime and that improvidence extend, would 
reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, 
of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the 
depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the 
species.* 


j Physical Improvement. 

True, there is a partial reverse to this picture. On narrow 
theatres, new forests have been planted; inundations of flowing 
streams restrained by heavy walls of masonry and other con¬ 
structions ; torrents compelled to aid, by depositing the slime 
with which they are charged, in filling up lowlands, and 

*-“And it may be remarked that, as the world has passed through 

these several stages of strife to produce a Christendom, so by relaxing in 
the enterprises it has learnt, does it tend downwards, through inverted 
steps, to wildness and the waste again. Let a people give up their contest 
with moral evil; disregard the injustice, the ignorance, the greediness, that 
may prevail among them, and part more and more with the Christian ele¬ 
ment of their civilization ; and in declining this battle with sin, they will 
inevitably get embroiled with men. Threats of war and revolution punish 
their unfaithfulness; and if then, instead of retracing their steps, they 
yield again, and are driven before the storm, the very arts they had cre¬ 
ated, the structures they had raised, the usages they had established, are 
swept away ; ‘ in that very day their thoughts perish.’ The portion they 
had reclaimed from the young earth’s ruggedness is lost; and failing to 
stand fast against man, they finally get embroiled with nature, and are 
thrust down beneath her ever-living hand.”— Martineau’s Sermon , “The 
Good Soldier of Jesus Christ J 



LIMITS OF HUMAN POWER. 


45 


raising the level of morasses which their own overflows had 
created; ground submerged by the encroachments of the 
ocean, or exposed to be covered by its tides, has been rescued 
from its dominion by diking; * swamps and even lakes have 
been drained, and their beds brought 'within the domain of 
agricultural industry ; drifting coast dunes have been checked 
and made productive by plantation ; seas and inland waters 
have been repeopled with fish, and even the sands of the 
Sahara have been fertilized by artesian fountains. These 
achievements are more glorious than the proudest triumphs of 
war, but, thus far, they give but faint hope that we shall yet 
make full atonement for our spendthrift waste of the bounties 
of nature. 

It is, on the one hand, rash and unphilosophical to attempt 
to set limits to the ultimate power of man over inorganic 
nature, and it is unprofitable, on the other, to speculate on 
what may be accomplished by the discovery of now unknown 
and unimagined natural forces, or even by the invention of 
new arts and new processes. But since we have seen aerosta¬ 
tion, the motive power of elastic vapors, the wonders of 
modern telegraphy, the destructive explosiveness of gun¬ 
powder, and even of a substance so harmless, unresisting, and 
inert as cotton, nothing in the way of mechanical achievement 
seems impossible, and it is hard to restrain the imagination 
from wandering forward a couple of generations to an epoch 
when our descendants shall have advanced as far beyond us in 
physical conquest, as w r e have marched beyond the trophies 
erected by our grandfathers. 

I must therefore be understood to mean only, that no 
agencies now known to man and directed by him seem 
adequate to the reducing of great Alpine precipices to such 

* The dependence of man upon the aid of spontaneous nature, in his 
most arduous material works, is curiously illustrated by the fact that one 
of the most serious difficulties to be encountered in executing the proposed 
gigantic scheme of draining the Zuiderzee in Holland, is that of procuring 
brushwood for the fascines to be employed in the embankments. See 
Diggelen’s pamphlet, u Groote WerJcen in Nederland.'" 


46 


ACCUMULATION OF NATURAL FORCES. 


slopes as would enable them to support a vegetable clothing, 
or to the covering of large extents of denuded rock with earth, 
and planting upon them a forest growth. But among the 
mysteries which science is yet to reveal, there may be still 
undiscovered methods of accomplishing even grander wonders 
than these. Mechanical philosophers have suggested the pos¬ 
sibility of accumulating and treasuring up for human use some 
of the greater natural forces, which the action of the elements 
puts forth with such astonishing energy. Could we gather, 
and bind, and make subservient to our control, the power 
which a West Indian hurricane exerts through a small area in 
one continuous blast, or the momentum expended by the 
waves, in a tempestuous winter, upon the breakwater at Cher¬ 
bourg,* or the lifting power of the tide, for a month, at the 
head of the Bay of Fundy, or the pressure of a square mile of 
sea water at the depth of five thousand fathoms, or a moment 
of the might of an earthquake or a volcano, our age—which 
moves no mountains and casts them into the sea by faith alone 
—might hope to scarp the rugged walls of the Alps and 
Pyrenees and Mount Taurus, robe them once more in a vege¬ 
tation as rich as that of their pristine woods, and turn their 
wasting torrents into refreshing streams.f 

* In heavy storms, the force of the waves as they strike against a sea 
wall is from one and a half to two tons to the square foot, and Stevenson, 
in one instance at Skerryvore, found this force equal to three tons per foot. 

The seaward front of the breakwater at Cherbourg exposes a surface 
of about 2,500,000 square feet. In rough weather the waves beat against 
this whole face, though at the depth of twenty-two yards, which is the 
height of the breakwater, they exert a very much less violent motive force 
than at and near the surface of the sea, because this force diminishes in 
geometrical, as the distance below the surface increases in arithmetical pro¬ 
portion. The shock of the waves is received several thousand times in the 
course of twenty-four hours, and hence the sum of impulse which the 
breakwater resists in one stormy day amounts to many thousands of 
millions of tons. The breakwater is entirely an artificial construction. 
If then man could accumulate and control the forces which he is able effect¬ 
ually to resist, he might be said to be, physically speaking, omnipotent. 

t Some well known experiments show that it is quite possible to accu¬ 
mulate the solar heat by a simple apparatus, and thus to obtain a temper- 


PHYSICAL RESTORATION. 


47 


Could tliis old world, which man has overthrown, be 
rebuilded, could human cunning rescue its wasted hillsides 
and its deserted plains from solitnde or mere nomade occupa¬ 
tion, from barrenness, from nakedness, and from insalubrity, 
and restore the ancient fertility and healthfulness of the 
Etruscan sea coast, the Campagna and the Pontine marshes, 
of Calabria, of Sicily, of the Peloponnesus and insular and 
continental Greece, of Asia Minor, of the slopes of Lebanon 
and Hermon, of Palestine, of the Syrian desert, of Mesopo¬ 
tamia and the delta of the Euphrates, of the Cyrenaica, of 
Africa proper, bfumidia, and Mauritania, the thronging mil¬ 
lions of Europe might still find room on the Eastern continent, 
and the main current of emigration be turned toward the 
rising instead of the setting sun. 

But changes like these must await great political and 
moral revolutions in the governments and peoples by whom 
those regions are now possessed, a command of pecuniary and 
of mechanical means not at present enjoyed by those nations, 
and a more advanced and generally diffused knowledge of the 
processes by which the amelioration of soil and climate is pos¬ 
sible, than now anywhere exists. Until such circumstances 
shall conspire to favor the work of geographical regeneration, 
the countries I have mentioned, with here and there a local 
exception, will continue to sink into yet deeper desolation, and 

ature which might be economically important even in the climate of Swit¬ 
zerland. Saussure, by receiving the sun’s rays in a nest of boxes black¬ 
ened within and covered wdth glass, raised a thermometer enclosed in the 
inner box to the boiling point; and under the more powerful sun of the 
cape of Good Hope, Sir John Herschel cooked the materials for a family 
dinner by a similar process, using, however, but a single box, surrounded 
with dry sand and covered with two glasses. Why should not so easy a 
method of economizing fuel be resorted to in Italy, and even in more 
northerly climates ? 

The unfortunate John Davidson records in his journal that he saved fuel 
in Morocco by exposing his teakettle to the sun on the roof of his house, 
where the water rose to the temperature of one hundred and forty degrees, 
and, of course, needed little fire to bring it to boil. But this was the 
direct and simple, not the accumulated heat of the sun. 


*8 ARREST OF PHYSICAL DECAY OF NEW COUNTRIES. 

in the mean time, the American continent, Southern Africa, 
Australia, and the smaller oceanic islands, will be almost the 
only theatres where man is engaged, on a great scale, in trans¬ 
forming the face of nature. 

Arrest of Physical Decay of New Countries. 

Comparatively short as is the period through which the 
colonization of foreign lands by European emigrants extends, 
great, and, it is to be feared, sometimes irreparable, injury has 
been already done in the various processes by which man 
seeks to subjugate the virgin earth ; and many provinces, first 
trodden by the homo sapiens Furopce within the last two 
centuries, begin to show signs of that melancholy dilapidation 
which is now driving so many of the peasantry of Europe 
from their native hearths. It is evidently a matter of great 
moment, not only to the population of the states where these 
symptoms are manifesting themselves, but to the general 
interests of humanity, that this decay should be arrested, and 
that the future operations of rural husbandry and of forest 
industry, in districts yet remaining substantially in their 
native condition, should be so conducted as to prevent the 
widespread mischiefs which have been elsewhere produced by 
thoughtless or wanton destruction of the natural safeguards of 
the soil. This can be done only by the diffusion of knowledge 
on this subject among the classes that, in earlier days, subdued 
and tilled ground in which they had no vested rights, but 
who, in our time, own their woods, their pastures, and their 
ploughlands as a perpetual possession for them and theirs, and 
have, therefore, a strong interest in the protection of their 
domain against deterioration. 

Forms and Formations most liable to Physical Degradation. 

The character and extent of the evils under consideration 
depend very much on climate and the natural forms and con¬ 
stitution of surface. If the precipitation, whether great or 
small in amount, be equally distributed through the seasons s 


CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. 


49 


so that there are neither torrential rains nor parching droughts, 
and if, further, the general inclination of ground be moderate, 
so that the superficial waters are carried off without destruc¬ 
tive rapidity of flow, and without sudden accumulation in the 
channels of natural drainage, there is little danger of the 
degradation of the soil in consequence of the removal of forest 
or other vegetable covering, and the natural face of the earth 
may be considered as substantially permanent. These condi¬ 
tions are well exemplified in Ireland, in a great part of Eng¬ 
land, in extensive districts in Germany and France, and, for¬ 
tunately, in an immense proportion of the valley of the Missis¬ 
sippi and the basin of the great American lakes, as well as in 
many parts of the continents of South America and of Africa. 

Destructive changes are most frequent in countries of 
irregular and mountainous surface, and in climates where the 
precipitation is confined chiefly to a single season, and where 
the year is divided into a wet and a dry period, as is the case 
throughout a great part of the Ottoman empire, and, more or 
iess strictly, the whole Mediterranean basin. It is partly, 
though by no means entirely, owing to topographical and 
climatic causes that the blight, which has smitten the fairest 
and most fertile provinces of Imperial Rome, has spared Bri¬ 
tannia, Germania, Pannonia, and Mcesia, the comparatively 
inhospitable homes of barbarous races, who, in the days of the 
Caesars, were too little advanced in civilized life to possess 
either the power or the will to wage that war against the 
order of nature which seems, hitherto, an almost inseparable 
condition precedent of high social culture, and of great prog¬ 
ress in fine and mechanical art.* 

* In the successive stages of social progress, the most destructive pe¬ 
riods of human action upon nature are the pastoral condition, and that of 
incipient stationary civilization, or, in the newly discovered countries of 
modern geography, the colonial, which corresponds to the era of early 
civilization in older lands. In more advanced states of culture, conservative 
influences make themselves felt; and if highly civilized communities do 
not always restore the works of nature, they at least use a less wasteful 
expenditure than their predecessors in consuming them. 


50 


MOUNTAINOUS COUNTRIES-CHANGE OF CLIMATE. 


In mountainous countries, on the other hand, various 
causes combine to expose the soil to constant dangers. The 
rain and snow usually fall in greater quantity, and with much 
inequality of distribution ; the snow on the summits accumu¬ 
lates for many months in succession, and then is not unfre¬ 
quently almost wholly dissolved in a single thaw, so that the 
entire precipitation of months is in a few hours hurried down 
the flanks of the mountains, and through the ravines that 
furrow them; the natural inclination of the surface promotes 
the swiftness of the gathering currents of diluvial rain and of 
melting snow, which soon acquire an almost irresistible force, 
and power of removal and transportation ; the soil itself is 
less compact and tenacious than that of the plains, and if the 
sheltering forest has been destroyed, it is confined by few of 
the threads and ligaments by which nature had bound it 
together, and attached it to the rocky groundwork. Hence 
every considerable shower lays bare its roods of rock, and the 
torrents sent down by the thaws of spring, and by occasional 
heavy discharges of the summer and autumnal rains, are seas 
of mud and rolling stones that sometimes lay waste, and bury 
beneath them acres, and even miles, of pasture and field and 
vineyard.* 


Physical Decay of New Countries. 

I have remarked that the effects of human action on the 
forms of the earth’s surface could not always be distinguished 
from those resulting from geological causes, and there is also 
much uncertainty in respect to the precise influence of the 

* The character of geological formation is an element of very great im¬ 
portance in determining the amount of erosion produced by running water, 
and, of course, in measuring the consequences of clearing off the forests. 
The soil of the French Alps yields very readily to the force of currents, 
and the declivities of the northern Apennines are covered with earth which 
becomes itself a fluid when saturated with water. Hence the erosion of 
such surfaces is vastly greater than on many other mountains of equal 
steepness of inclination. This point is fully considered by the authors re¬ 
ferred to in chap, iii, post. 


AUSTRALIA AS A FIELD OF OBSERVATION. 


51 


clearing and cultivating of the ground, and of other rural 
operations, upon climate. It is disputed whether either the 
mean or the extremes of temperature, the periods of the 
seasons, or the amount or distribution of precipitation and of 
evaporation, in any country whose annals are known, have 
undergone any change during the historical period. It is, 
indeed, impossible to doubt that many of the operations of the 
pioneer settler tend to produce great modifications in atmo¬ 
spheric humidity, temperature, and electricity ; but we are at 
present unable to determine how far one set of effects is neu¬ 
tralized by another, or compensated by unknown agencies. 
This question scientific research is inadequate to solve, for 
want of the necessary data; hut well conducted observation, 
in regions now first brought under the occupation of man, 
combined with such historical evidence as still exists, may he 
expected at no distant period to throw much light on this 
subj ect. 

Australia is, perhaps, the country from which we have a 
right to expect the fullest elucidation of these difficult and 
disputable problems. Its colonization did not commence 'until 
the physical sciences had become matter of almost universal 
attention, and is, indeed, so recent that the memory of living 
men embraces the principal epochs of its history; the pecu¬ 
liarities of its fauna, its flora, and its geology are such as to 
have excited for it the liveliest interest of the votaries of 
natural science ; its mines have given its people the necessary 
wealth for procuring the means of instrumental observation, 
and the leisure required for the pursuit of scientific research ; 
and large tracts of virgin forest and natural meadow are rap¬ 
idly passing under the control of civilized man. Here, then, 
exist greater facilities and stronger motives for the careful study 
of the topics in question than have ever been found combined 
in any other theatre of European colonization. 

In North America, the change from the natural to the arti¬ 
ficial condition of terrestrial surface began about the period 
when the most important instruments of meteorological obser¬ 
vation were invented. The first settlers in the territory now 


52 


AMERICAN PROVINCES—SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATION. 


constituting the United States and the British American prov¬ 
inces had other things to do than to tabulate barometrical and 
thermometrical readings, but there remain some interesting 
physical records from the early days of the colonies,* and there 
is still an immense extent of North American soil where the 
industry and the folly of man have as yet produced little 
appreciable change. Here, too, with the present increased 
facilities for scientific observation, the future effects, direct and 
contingent, of man’s labors, can be measured, and such precau¬ 
tions taken in those rural processes which we call improve¬ 
ments, as to mitigate evils, perhaps, in some degree, insep¬ 
arable from every attempt to control the action of natural 
laws. 

In order to arrive at safe conclusions, we must first obtain 
a more exact knowledge of the topography, and of the present 
superficial and climatic condition of countries where the nat¬ 
ural surface is as yet more or less unbroken. This can only be 
accomplished by accurate surveys, and by a great multiplica¬ 
tion of the points of meteorological registry,f already so 

* The Travels of Dr. Dwight, president of Yale College, which embody 
the results of his personal observations, and of his inquiries among the 
early settlers, in his vacation excursions in the Northern States of the 
American Union, though presenting few instrumental measurements or 
tabulated results, are of value for the powers of observation they exhibit, 
and for the sound common sense with which many natural phenomena, 
such for instance as the formation of the river meadows, called “inter¬ 
vales,” in New England, are explained. They present a true and interest¬ 
ing picture of physical conditions, many of which have long ceased to 
exist in the theatre of his researches, and of which few other records are 
extant. 

t The general law of temperature is that it decreases as we ascend. 
But, in hilly regions, the law is reversed in cold, still weather, the cold air 
descending, by reason of its greater gravity, into the valleys. If there be 
wind enough, however, to produce a disturbance and intermixture of 
higher and lower atmospheric strata, this exception to the general law 
does not take place. These facts have long been familiar to the common 
people of Switzerland and of New England, but their importance has not 
been sufficiently taken into account in the discussion of meteorological 
observations. The descent of the cold air and the rise of the warm affect 


SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATION-RAILWAYS. 


53 


numerous ; and as, moreover, considerable changes in the pro¬ 
portion of forest and of cultivated land, or of dry and wholly 
or partially submerged surface, will often take place within 
brief periods, it is highly desirable that the attention of 
observers, in whose neighborhood the clearing of the soil, or 
the drainage of lakes and swamps, or other great works of 
rural improvement, are going on or meditated, should be espe¬ 
cially drawn not only to revolutions in atmospheric tempera¬ 
ture and precipitation, but to the more easily ascertained and 
perhaps more important local changes produced by these 
operations in the temperature and the hygrometric state of 
the superficial strata of the earth, and in its spontaneous vege¬ 
table and animal products. 

The rapid extension of railroads, which now everywhere 
keeps pace with, and sometimes even precedes, the occupation 
of new soil for agricultural purposes, furnishes great facilities 
for enlarging our knowledge of the topography of the territory 
they traverse, because their cuttings reveal the composition 
and general structure of surface, and the inclination and eleva¬ 
tion of their lines constitute known liypsometrical sections, 
which give numerous points of departure for the measure¬ 
ment of higher and lower stations, and of course for deter¬ 
mining the relief and depression of surface, the slope of the 
beds of watercourses, and many other not less important 
questions.* 

the relative temperatures of hills and valleys to a much greater extent than 
has been usually supposed. A gentleman well known to me kept a ther- 
mometrical record for nearly half a century, in a New England country 
town, at an elevation of at least 1,500 feet above the sea. During these 
years his thermometer never fell lower than 26° Fahrenheit, but at the 
shire town of the county, situated in a basin one thousand feet lower, and 
ten miles distant, as well as at other points in similar positions, the mer¬ 
cury froze several times in the same period. 

* Railroad surveys must be received with great caution where any 
motive exists for cooking them. Capitalists are shy of investments in roads 
with steep grades, and of course it is important to make a fair show of 
facilities in obtaining funds for new routes. Joint-stock companies have 
no souls; their managers, in general, no consciences. Cases can be cited 


54 


PRACTICAL LESSONS. 


The geological, hydrographical, and topographical surveys, 
which almost every general and even local government of the 
civilized world is carrying on, are making yet more important 
contributions to our stock of geographical and general physical 
knowledge, and, within a comparatively short space, there will 

where engineers and directors of railroads, with long grades above one 
hundred feet to the mile, have regularly sworn in their annual reports, for 
years in succession, that there were no grades upon their routes exceeding 
half that elevation. In fact, every person conversant with the history of 
these enterprises knows that in their public statements falsehood is the 
rule, truth the exception. 

What I am about to remark is not exactly relevant to my subject; but 
it is hard to “ get the floor ” in the world’s great debating society, and 
when a speaker who has anything to say once finds access to the public 
ear, he must make the most of his opportunity, without inquiring too nicely 
whether his observations are “in order.” I shall harm no honest man by 
endeavoring, as I have often done elsewhere, to excite the attention of 
thinking and conscientious men to the dangers which threaten the great 
moral and even political interests of Christendom, from the unscrupulous¬ 
ness of the private associations that now control the monetary affairs, and 
regulate the transit of persons and property, in almost every civilized 
country. More than one American State is literally governed by unprin¬ 
cipled corporations, which not only defy the legislative power, but have, 
too often, corrupted even the administration of justice. Similar evils 
have become almost equally rife in England, and on the Continent; and I 
believe the decay of commercial morality, and I fear of the sense of all 
higher obligations than those of a pecuniary nature, on both sides of the 
Atlantic, is to be ascribed more to the influence of joint-stock banks and 
manufacturing and railway companies, to the workings, in short, of what is 
called the principle of “ associate action,” than to any other one cause of 
demoralization. 

The apophthegm, “ the world is governed too much,” though unhap¬ 
pily too truly spoken of many countries—and perhaps, in some aspects, 
true of all—has done much mischief whenever it has been too uncon¬ 
ditionally accepted as a political axiom. The popular apprehension of 
being over-governed, and, I am afraid, more emphatically the fear of being 
over-taxed, has had much to do with the general abandonment of certain 
governmental duties by the ruling powers of most modern states. It is 
theoretically the duty of government to provide all those public facilities 
of intercommunication and commerce, which are essential to the pros¬ 
perity of civilized commonwealths, but which individual means are inade¬ 
quate to furnish, and for the due administration of which individual guar- 


PRACTICAL LESSONS. 


55 


be an accumulation of well established constant and historical 
facts, from which we can safely reason upon all the relations 
of action and reaction between man and external nature. 

But we are, even now, breaking up the floor and wains¬ 
coting and doors and window frames of our dwelling, for 
fuel to warm our bodies and seethe our pottage, and the world 
cannot afford to wait till the slow and sure progress of exact 
science has taught it a better economy. Many practical 
lessons have been learned by the common observation of 
unschooled men; and the teachings of simple experience, on 
topics where natural philosophy has scarcely yet spoken, are 
not to be despised. 

In these humble pages, which do not in the least aspire to 
rank among scientific expositions of the laws of nature, I shall 

anties are insufficient. Hence public roads, canals, railroads, postal com¬ 
munications, the circulating medium of exchange, whether metallic or rep¬ 
resentative, armies, navies, being all matters in which the nation at large 
has a vastly deeper interest than any private association can have, ought 
legitimately to be constructed and provided only by that which is the visi¬ 
ble personification and embodiment of the nation, namely, its legislative 
head. No doubt the organization and management of these institutions 
by government are liable, as are all things human, to great abuses. The 
multiplication of public placeholders, which they imply, is a serious evil. 
But the corruption thus engendered, foul as it is, does not strike so deep as 
the rottenness of private corporations ; and official rank, position, and duty 
have, in practice, proved better securities for fidelity and pecuniary integ¬ 
rity in the conduct of the interests in question, than the suretyships of 
private corporate agents, whose bondsmen so often fail or abscond before 
their principal is detected. 

Many theoretical statesmen have thought that voluntary associations 
for strictly pecuniary and industrial purposes, and for the construction and 
control of public works, might furnish, in democratic countries, a compen¬ 
sation for the small and doubtful advantages, and at the same time secure 
an exemption from the great and certain evils, of aristocratic institutions. 
The example of the American States shows that private corporations— 
whose rule of action is the interest of the association, not the conscience 
of the individual—though composed of ultra-democratic elements, may 
become most dangerous enemies to rational liberty, to the moral interests 
of the commonwealth, to the purity of legislation and of judicial action, 
and to the sacredness of private rights. 


5G 


PRACTICAL LESSONS. 


attempt to give tlie most important practical conclusions sug¬ 
gested by the history of man’s efforts to replenish the earth 
and subdue it; and I shall aim to support those conclusions by 
such facts and illustrations only, as address themselves to the 
understanding of every intelligent reader, and as are to be 
found recorded in works capable of profitable perusal, or at 
least consultation, by persons who have not enjoyed a special 
scientific training. 


CHAPTER II. 


TRANSFER, MODIFICATION, AND EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLE AND 

OF ANIMAL SPECIES. 


MODERN GEOGRAPHY EMBRACES ORGANIC LIFE—TRANSFER OF VEGETABLE 

LIFE-FOREIGN PLANTS GROWN IN THE UNITED STATES—AMERICAN PLANTS 

GROWN IN EUROPE-MODES OF INTRODUCTION OF FOREIGN PLANTS—VEGE¬ 

TABLES, HOW AFFECTED BY TRANSFER TO FOREIGN SOILS—EXTIRPATION OF 

VEGETABLES—ORIGIN OF DOMESTIC PLANTS-ORGANIC LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL 

AND GEOGRAPHICAL AGENCY-ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS 

-EXTIRPATION OF ANIMALS—NUMBERS OF BIRDS IN THE UNITED STATES- 

BIRDS AS SOWERS AND CONSUMERS OF SEEDS, AND AS DESTROYERS OF IN¬ 
SECTS—DIMINUTION AND EXTIRPATION OF BIRDS—INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS— 
UTILITY OF INSECTS AND WORMS—INTRODUCTION OF INSECTS—DESTRUCTION 
OF INSECTS—REPTILES—DESTRUCTION OF FISH—INTRODUCTION AND BREED¬ 
ING OF FISH—EXTIRPATION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS—MINUTE ORGANISMS. 


Modern Geography embraces Organic Life. 

It was a narrow view of geography which confined that 
science to delineation of terrestrial surface and outline, and to 
description of the relative position and magnitude of land and 
water. In its improved form, it embraces not only the globe 
itself, but the living things which vegetate or move upon it, 
the varied influences they exert upon each other, the recip¬ 
rocal action and reaction between them and the earth they 
inhabit. Even if the end of geographical studies were only to 
obtain a knowledge of the external forms of the mineral and 
fluid masses which constitute the globe, it would still be 
necessary to take into account the element of life; for every 
plant, every animal, is a geographical agency, man a destruc- 


58 


INFLUENCE OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 


tive, vegetables, and even wild beasts, restorative powers. 
The rushing waters sweep down earth from the uplands ; in 
the first moment of repose, vegetation seeks to reestablish 
itself on the bared surface, and, by the slow deposit of its 
decaying products, to raise again the soil which the torrent 
had lowered. So important an element of reconstruction is 
this, that it has been seriously questioned whether, upon the 
whole, vegetation does not contribute as much to elevate, as 
the waters to depress, the level of the surface. 

Whenever man has transported a plant from its native 
habitat to a new soil, he has introduced a new geographical 
force to act upon it, and this generally at the expense of some 
indigenous growth which the foreign vegetable has supplanted. * 
The new and the old plants are rarely the equivalents of each 
other, and the substitution of an exotic for a native tree, shrub, 
or grass, increases or diminishes the relative importance of the 
vegetable element in the geography of the country to which 
it is removed. Further, man sows that he may reap. The 
products of agricultural industry are not suffered to rot upon 
the ground, and thus raise it by an annual stratum of new 
mould. They are gathered, transported to greater or less dis¬ 
tances, and after they have served their uses in human econ¬ 
omy, they enter, on the final decomposition of their elements, 
into new combinations, and are only in small proportion 
returned to the soil on which they grew. The roots of the 
grasses, and of many other cultivated plants, however, usually 
remain and decay in the earth, and contribute to raise its 
surface, though certainly not in the same degree as the forest. 

The vegetables, which have taken the place of trees, 
unquestionably perform many of the same functions. They 
radiate heat, they condense the humidity of the atmosphere, 
they act upon the chemical constitution of the air, their roots 
penetrate the earth to greater depths than is commonly sup¬ 
posed, and form an inextricable labyrinth of filaments which 
bind the soil together and prevent its erosion by water. The 
broad-leaved annuals and perennials, too, shade the ground, 
and prevent the evaporation of moisture from its surface by 


TRANSFER OF VEGETABLE LIFE. 


59 


wind and sun.* At a certain stage of growth, grass land is 
probably a more energetic radiator and condenser than even 
the forest, bnt this powerful action is exerted, in its full inten- 
sity, for a few days only,.while trees continue such functions, 
with unabated vigor, for many months in succession. Upon 
the whole, it seems quite certain, that no cultivated ground is 
as efficient in tempering climatic extremes, or in conservation 
of geographical surface and outline, as is the soil which nature 
herself has planted. 

Transfer of Vegetable Life. 

It belongs to vegetable and animal geography, which are 
almost sciences of themselves, to point out in detail what man 
has done to change the distribution of plants and of animated 
life and to revolutionize the aspect of organic nature; but 
some of the more important facts bearing on this subject may 
pertinently be introduced here. Most of the fruit trees grown 

* It is impossible to say how far the abstraction of water from the earth 
by broad-leaved field and garden plants—such as maize, the gourd family, 
the cabbage, &c.—is compensated by the condensation of dew, which some¬ 
times pours from them in a stream, by the exhalation of aqueous vapor 
from their leaves, which is directly absorbed by the ground, and by the 
shelter they afford the soil from sun and wind, thus preventing evapo¬ 
ration. American farmers often say that after the leaves of Indian corn 
are large enough to “shade the ground,” there is little danger that the 
plants will suffer from drought; but it is probable that the comparative 
security of the fields from this evil is in part due to the fact that, at this 
period of growth, the roots penetrate down to a permanently humid 
stratum of soil, and draw from it the moisture they require. Stirring the 
ground between the rows of maize with a light harrow or cultivator, in 
very dry seasons, is often recommended as a preventive of injury by 
drought. It would seem, indeed, that loosening and turning over the sur¬ 
face earth might aggravate the evil by promoting the evaporation of the 
little remaining moisture ; but the practice is founded partly on the belief 
that the hygroscopicity of the soil is increased by it to such a degree that 
it gains more by absorption than it loses by evaporation, and partly on the 
doctrine that to admit air to the rootlets, or at least to the earth near 
them, is to supply directly elements of vegetable growth. 


60 


VEGETABLES IMPORTANT IN COMMERCE. 


in Europe and the United States are believed, and—if the 
testimony of Pliny and other ancient naturalists is to be 
depended upon—many of them are historically known, to have 
originated in the temperate climates.of Asia. The wine grape 
has been thought to be truly indigenous only in the regions 
bordering on the eastern end of the Black Sea, where it now, 
particularly on the banks of the Rion, the ancient Phasis, 
propagates itself spontaneously, and grows with unexampled 
luxuriance.* But some species of the vine seem native to 
Europe, and many varieties of grape have been too long 
known as common to every part of the United States to admit 
of the supposition that they were all introduced by European 
colonists, f 

It is an interesting fact that the commerce—or at least the 
maritime carrying trade—and the agricultural and mechanical 
industry of the world are, in very large proportion, dependent 
on vegetable and animal products little or not at all known 
to ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish civilization. In many 
instances, the chief supply of these articles comes from coun¬ 
tries to which they are probably indigenous, and where they 
are still almost exclusively grown; but in many others, the 
plants or animals from which they are derived have been 

* The vine-wood planks of the ancient great door of the cathedral at 
Bavenna, which measured thirteen feet in length by a foot and a quarter 
in width, are traditionally said to have been brought from the Black Sea, 
by way of Constantinople, about the eleventh or twelfth century. No 
vines of such dimensions are now found in any other part of the East, and, 
though I have taken some pains on the subject, I never found in Syria or 
in Turkey a vine stock exceeding six inches in diameter, bark included. 

t The Northmen who—as I think it has been indisputably established 
by Professor Kafn of Copenhagen—visited the coast of Massachusetts about 
the year 1000, found grapes growing there in profusion, and the vine still 
flourishes in great variety and abundance in the southeastern counties of 
that State. The townships in the vicinity of the Dighton rock, supposed 
by many—with whom, however, I am sorry I cannot agree—to bear a 
Scandinavian inscription, abound in wild vines, and I have never seen a 
region which produced them so freely. I have no doubt that the culti¬ 
vation of the grape will become, at no distant day, one of the most im¬ 
portant branches of rural industry in that district. 


AGRICULTURE OF THE UNITED STATES. 


61 


introduced by man into the regions now remarkable for their 
most successful cultivation, and that, too, in comparatively 
recent times, or, in other words, within two or three centuries. 


Foreign Plants grown in the United States. 

According to Bigelow, the United States had, on the first 
of June, 1860, in round numbers, 163,000,000 acres of im¬ 
proved land, the quantity having been increased by 50,000,000 
acres within the ten years next preceding.* Not to men¬ 
tion less important crops, this land produced, in the year end¬ 
ing on the day last mentioned, in round numbers, 171,000,000 
bushels of wheat, 21,000,000 bushels of rye, 172,000,000 bush¬ 
els of oats, 15,000,000 bushels of pease and beans, 16,000,000 
bushels of barley, orchard fruits to the value of $20,000,000, 
900,000 bushels of cloverseed, 900,000 bushels of other grass 
seed, 104,000 tons of hemp, 4,000,000 pounds of flax, and 
600,000 pounds of flaxseed. These vegetable growths were 
familiar to ancient European agriculture, but they were all 
introduced into North America after the close of the sixteenth 
century. 

Of the fruits of agricultural industry unknown to the 
Greeks and Bomans, or too little employed by them to be 
of any commercial importance, the United States produced, 
in the same year, 187,000,000 pounds of rice, 18,000,000 bush¬ 
els of buckwheat, 2,075,000,000 pounds of ginned cotton,f 

* Les Mats Unis d'Amerique en 1863, p. 360. By “improved” land, in 
the reports on the census of the United States, is meant “ cleared land 
used for grazing, grass, or tillage, or which is now fallow, connected with 
or belonging to a farm.”— Instructions to Marshals and Assistants, Census 
of 1850, schedule 4, §§ 2, 3. 

f Cotton, though cultivated in Asia and Africa from the remotest an¬ 
tiquity, and known as a rare and costly product to the Latins and the 
Greeks, was not used by them to any considerable extent, nor did it enter 
into their commerce as a regular article of importation. The early voy¬ 
agers found it in common use in the West Indies and in the provinces first 
colonized by the Spaniards ; hut it was introduced into the territory of the 
United States by European settlers, and did not become of any importance 


62 


AGRICULTURE OF THE UNITED STATES. 


302,000,000 pounds of cane sugar, 16,000,000 gallons of cane 
molasses, 7,000,000 gallons of sorghum molasses, all yielded 
by vegetables introduced into that country within two hundred 
years, and—with the exception of buckwheat, the origin of 
which is uncertain, and of cotton—all, directly or indirectly, 
from the East Indies; besides, from indigenous plants unknown 
to ancient agriculture, 830,000,000 bushels of Indian corn or 
maize, 429,000,000 pounds of tobacco, 110,000,000 bushels of 
potatoes, 42,000,000 bushels of sweet potatoes, 39,000,000 
pounds of maple sugar, and 2,000,000 gallons of maple mo¬ 
lasses. To all this we are to add 19,000,000 tons of hay, 
produced partly by new, partly by long known, partly by 
exotic, partly by native herbs and grasses, an incalculable 
quantity of garden vegetables, chiefly of European or Asiatic 
origin, and many minor agricultural products. 

The weight of this harvest of a year would he not less than 
60,000,000 tons—which is eleven times the tonnage of all the 
shipping of the United States at the close of the year 1861— 
and, with the exception of the maple sugar, the maple molas¬ 
ses, and the products of the Western prairie lands and some 
small Indian clearings, it was all grown upon lands wrested 
from the forest by the European race within little more than 
two hundred years. The wants of Europe have introduced 
into the colonies of tropical America the sugar cane, the coffee 
plant, the orange and the lemon,* all of Oriental origin, have 

until after the Revolution. Cotton seed was sown in Virginia as early as 
1621, but was not cultivated with a view to profit for more than a century 
afterward. Sea-island cotton was first grown on the coast of Georgia in 
1786, the seed having been brought from the Bahamas, where it had been 
introduced from Anguilla. —Bigelow, Les Mats Unis en 1863, p. 370. 

* The sugar cane was introduced by the Arabs into Sicily and Spain as 
early as the ninth century, and though it is now scarcely grown in those 
localities, I am not aware of any reason to doubt that its cultivation might 
be revived with advantage. From Spain it was carried to the West Indies, 
though different varieties have since been introduced into those islands 
from other sources. Tea is now cultivated with a certain success in Brazil, 
and promises to become an important crop in the Southern States of the 
American Union. The lemon is, I think, readily recognizable, by Pliny’s 


AMERICAN PLANTS IN EUROPE. 


63 


immensely stimulated the cultivation of the former two in the 
countries of which they are natives, and, of course, promoted 
agricultural operations which must have affected the geogra¬ 
phy of those regions to an extent proportionate to the scale on 
which they have been pursued. 


American Plants grown in Europe. 

America has partially repaid her debt to the Eastern conti¬ 
nent. Maize and the potato are very valuable additions to 
the field agriculture of Europe and the East, and the tomato is 
no mean gift to the kitchen gardens of the Old World, though 
certainly not an adequate return for the multitude of esculent 
roots and leguminous plants which the European colonists 
carried with them.* I wish I could believe, with some, that 
America is not alone responsible for the introduction of the 
filthy weed, tobacco, the use of which is the most vulgar and 
pernicious habit engrafted by the serni-barbarism of modern 
civilization upon the less multifarious sensualism of ancient 
life ; f but the alleged occurrence of pipe-like objects in Scla- 

description, as known to the ancients, but it does not satisfactorily appear 
that they were acquainted with the orange. 

* John Smith mentions, in his Historic of Virginia , 1624, pease and 
beans as having been cultivated by the natives before the arrival of the 
whites, and there is no doubt, I believe, that the pumpkin and several 
other cucurbitaceous plants are of American origin; but most, if not all 
the varieties of pease, beans, and other pod fruits now grown in American 
gardens, are from European and other foreign seed. 

t There are some usages of polite society which are inherently low in 
themselves, and debasing in their influence and tendency, and which no 
custom or fashion can make respectable or fit to be followed by self- 
respecting persons. It is essentially vulgar to smoke or chew tobacco, and 
especially to take snuff; it is unbecoming a gentleman to perform the 
duties of his coachman; it is indelicate in a lady to wear in the street 
skirts so long that she cannot walk without grossly soiling them. Not 
that all these things are not practised by persons justly regarded as gentle¬ 
men and ladies ; but the same individuals would be, and feel themselves to 
be, much more emphatically gentlemen and ladies, it they abstained from 
them. 


64 


INTRODUCTION OF NEW PLANTS. 


vonic, and, it has been said, in Hungarian sepulchres, is hardly 
sufficient evidence to convict those races of complicity in this 
grave offence against the temperance and the refinement of 
modern society. 


Modes of Introduction of Foreign Plants. 

Besides the vegetables I have mentioned, we know that 
many plants of smaller economical value have been the sub¬ 
jects of international exchange in very recent times. Bus- 
bequius, Austrian ambassador at Constantinople about the 
middle of the sixteenth century—whose letters contain one of 
the best accounts of Turkish life which have appeared down 
to the present day—brought home from the Ottoman capital 
the lilac and the tulip. The Belgian Clusius about the same 
time introduced from the East the horse chestnut, which has 
since wandered to America. The weeping willows of Europe 
and the United States are said to have sprung from a slip 
received from Smyrna by the poet Pope, and planted by him 
in an English garden; and the Portuguese declare that the 
progenitor of all the European and American oranges was an 
Oriental tree transplanted to Lisbon, and still living in the last 
generation.* The present favorite flowers of the parterres of 

* The name portogallo , so generally applied to the orange in Italy, 
seems to favor this claim. The orange, however, was known in Europe 
before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and, therefore, before the 
establishment of direct relations between Portugal and the East. 

A correspondent of the Athenaeum, in describing the newly excavated 
villa, which has been named Livia’s Villa, near the Porta del Popolo at 
Pome, states that: “ The walls of one of the rooms are, singularly enough, 
decorated with landscape paintings, a grove of palm and orange trees, with 
fruits and birds on the branches—the colors all as fresh and lively as if 
painted yesterday.” The writer remarks on the character of this decora¬ 
tion as something very unusual in Eoman architecture ; and if the trees in 
question are really orange, and not lemon trees, this circumstance may 
throw some doubt on the antiquity of the painting. If, on the other hand, 
it proves really ancient, it shows that the orange was known to the Roman 
painters, if not gardeners. The landscape may perhaps represent oriental, 


VEGETABLE POWER OF ACCOMMODATION. 


65 


Europe have been imported from America, Japan and other 
remote Oriental countries, within a century and a half, and, in 
fine, there are few vegetables of any agricultural importance, 
few ornamental trees or decorative plants, which are not now 
common to the three civilized continents. 

The statistics of vegetable emigration exhibit numerical 
results quite surprising to those not familiar with the subject. 
The lonely island of St. Helena is described as producing, at 
the time of its discovery in the year 1501, about sixty vege¬ 
table species, including some three or four known to grow 
elsewhere also. At the present time its flora numbers seven 
hundred and fifty species. Humboldt and Bonpland found, 
among the unquestionably indigenous plants of tropical 
America, monocotyledons only, all the dicotyledons of those 
extensive regions having been probably introduced after the 
colonization of the Hew World by Spain. 

The faculty of spontaneous reproduction and perpetuation 
necessarily supposes a greater power of accommodation, within 
a certain range, than we find in most domesticated plants, for 
it would rarely happen that the seed of a wild plant would fall 
into ground as nearly similar, in composition and condition, to 
that where its parent grew, as the soils of different fields arti¬ 
ficially prepared for growing a particular vegetable are to each 
other. Accordingly, though every wild species affects a hab¬ 
itat of a particular character, it is found that, if accidentally 
or designedly sown elsewhere, it will grow under conditions 
extremely unlike those of its birthplace.* Cooper says : “We 

not European scenery. The accessories of the picture would probably de¬ 
termine that question.— Athenazum, No. 1859, June 13, 1863. 

Muller, Das Buck der PJianzenwelt , p. 86, asserts that in 1802 the an¬ 
cestor of all the mulberries in France, planted in 1500, was still standing 
in a garden in the village of Allan-Mont61imart. 

* The vegetables which, so far as we know their history, seem to have 
been longest the objects of human care, can, by painstaking industry, be 
made to grow under a great variety of circumstances, and some of them— 
the vine for instance—prosper nearly equally well, when planted and 
tended, on soils of almost any geological character; but their seeds vege¬ 
tate only in artificially prepared ground, they have little self-sustaining 
6 


06 


ACCIDENTAL INTRODUCTION OF PLANTS. 


cannot say positively that any plant is uncultivable anywhere 
until it has been tried ; ” and this seems to be even more true 
of wild than of domesticated vegetation. 

The seven hundred new species which have found their 
way to St. Helena within three centuries and a half, were cer¬ 
tainly not all, or even in the largest proportion, designedly 
planted there by human art, and if we were well acquainted 
with vegetable emigration, we should probably be able to 
show that man has intentionally transferred fewer plants than 
he has accidentally introduced into countries foreign to them. 
After the wheat, follow the tares that infest it. The weeds 
that grow among the cereal grains, the pests of the kitchen 
garden, are the same in America as in Europe.* The over¬ 
turning of a wagon, or any of the thousand accidents which 
befall the emigrant in his journey across the Western plains, 
may scatter upon the ground the seeds he designed for his 
garden, and the herbs which fill so important a place in the 
rustic materia medica of the Eastern States, spring up along 
the prairie paths but just opened by the caravan of the settler.f 

power, and they soon perish when the nursing hand of man is withdrawn 
from them. In range of climate, wild plants are much more limited than 
domestic, but much less so with regard to the state of the soil in which 
they germinate and grow. 

Dr. Dwight remarks that the seeds of American forest trees will not 
vegetate when dropped on grassland. This is one of the very few errors 
of personal observation to be found in that author’s writings. There are 
seasons, indeed, when few tree seeds germinate in the meadows and the 
pastures, and years favorable to one species are not always propitious to 
another; but there is no American forest tree known to me which does 
not readily propagate itself by seed in the thickest greensward, if its germs 
are not disturbed by man or animals. 

* Some years ago I made a collection of weeds in the wheatfields of 
Upper Egypt, and another in the gardens on the Bosphorus. Nearly all 
the plants were identical with those which grow under the same conditions 
in New England. I do not remember to have seen in America the scarlet 
wild poppy 60 common in European grainfields. I have heard, however, 
that it has lately crossed the Atlantic, and I am not sorry for it. With 
our abundant harvests of wheat, we can well afford to pay now and then 
a loaf of bread for the cheerful radiance of this brilliant dower. 

t Josselyn, who wrote about fifty years after the foundation of the first 


ACCIDENTAL INTRODUCTION OF PLANTS. 


67 


The hortus siccus of a botanist may accidentally sow seeds 
from the foot of the Himalayas on the plains that skirt the 
Alps; and it is a fact of very familiar observation, that exotics, 
transplanted to foreign climates suited to their growth, often 
escape from the flower garden and naturalize themselves 
among the spontaneous vegetation * of the pastures. When 
the cases containing the artistic treasures of Thorvaldsen were 
opened in the court of the museum where they are deposited, 
the straw and grass employed in packing them w^ere scattered 
upon the ground, and the next season there sprang up from 
the seeds no less than twenty-five species of plants belonging 
to the Homan campagna, some of which were preserved and 
cultivated as a new tribute to the memory of the great Scan¬ 
dinavian sculptor, and at least four are said to have spon¬ 
taneously naturalized themselves about Copenhagen.* In the 
campaign of 1814, the Russian troops brought, in the stuffing 
of their saddles and by other accidental means, seeds from the 
banks of the Dnieper to the valley of the Rhine, and even 
introduced the plants of the steppes into the environs of Paris. 
The Turkish armies, in their incursions into Europe, brought 
Eastern vegetables in their train, and left the seeds of Oriental 
wall plants to grow upon the ramparts of Buda and Yienna.f 

British colony in New England, says that the settlers at Plymouth had ob¬ 
served more than twenty English plants springing up spontaneously near 
their improvements. 

Every country has many plants not now, if ever, made use of by man, 
and therefore not designedly propagated by him, but which cluster around 
his dwelling, and continue to grow luxuriantly on the ruins of his rural 
habitation after he has abandoned it. The site of a cottage, the very foun¬ 
dation stones of which have been carried off, may often be recognized, 
years afterward, by the rank weeds which cover it, though no others of 
the same species are found for miles. 

“Hedieeval Catholicism,” says Vaupell, “brought us the red horsehoof 
—whose reddish-brown flower buds shoot up from the ground when the 
snow melts, and are followed by the large leaves —Iwgehulsuhher and 
snake-root, which grow only where there were convents and other dwell¬ 
ings in the Middle Ages.”— Bogens Indvandring i de Banshe Shove, pp. 1, 2. 

* Vaupell, Bogens Invandring i de Banshe Shove, p. 2. 

t It is, I believe, nearly certain that the Turks inflicted tobacco upon 


68 f TENACITY OF LIFE IN WILD ORGANISMS. 

The Canada thistle, Erigeron Canadense , is said to have 
sprung up in Europe, two hundred years ago, from a seed 
which dropped out of the stuffed skin of a bird.* 


Vegetables , how affected by Transfer to Foreign Soils. 

Vegetables, naturalized abroad either by accident or design, 
sometimes exhibit a greatly increased luxuriance of growth. 
The European cardoon, an esculent thistle, has broken out 
from the gardens of the Spanish colonies on the La Plata, 
acquired a gigantic stature, and propagated itself, in impen¬ 
etrable thickets, over hundreds of leagues of the Pampas ; and 
the Anacharis alsinastrum , a water plant not much inclined 
to spread in its native American habitat, has found its way 
into English rivers, and extended itself to such a degree as to 
form a serious obstruction to the how of the current, and even 
to navigation. 

Not only do many wild plants exhibit a remarkable facility 
of accommodation, but their seeds usually possess great tena¬ 
city of life, and their germinating power resists very severe 
trials. Hence, while the seeds of very many cultivated vege¬ 
tables lose their vitality in two or three years, and can be 
transported safely to distant countries only with great precau¬ 
tions, the weeds that infest those vegetables, though not cared 
for by man, continue to accompany him in his migrations, and 
find a new home on every soil he colonizes. Nature fights in 

Hungary, and probable that they in some measure compensated the injury 
by introducing maize also, which, as well as tobacco, has been claimed as 
Hungarian by patriotic Magyars. 

* Accidents sometimes limit, as well as promote, the propagation of 
foreign vegetables in countries new to them. The Lombardy poplar is a 
dioecious tree, and is very easily grown from cuttings. In most of the 
countries into which it has been introduced the cuttings have been taken 
from the male, and as, consequently, males only have grown from them, 
the poplar does not produce seed in those regions. This is a fortunate cir¬ 
cumstance, for otherwise this most worthless and least ornamental of trees 
would spread with a rapidity that would make it an annoyance to the 
agriculturist. 


TENACITY OF LIFE IN WILD ANIMALS. GO 

% 

defence of her free children, hut wars upon them when they 
have deserted her banners, and tamely submitted to the 
dominion of man.* 

Not only is the wild plant much hardier than the domes¬ 
ticated vegetable, but the same law prevails in animated brute 
and even human life. The beasts of the chase are more capa¬ 
ble of endurance and privation and more tenacious of life, than 
the domesticated animals which most nearly resemble them. 
The savage fights on, after he has received half a dozen mortal 
wounds, the least of which would have instantly paralyzed the 
strength of his civilized enemy, and, like the wild boar,f he 
has been known to press forward along the shaft of the spear 
which was transpiercing his vitals, and to deal a deathblow on 
the soldier who wielded it. 

True, domesticated plants can be gradually acclimatized to 
bear a degree of heat or of cold, which, in their wild state, 
they would not have supported; the trained English racer 
outstrips the swiftest horse of the pampas or prairies, perhaps 
even the less systematically educated courser of the Arab ; the 
strength of the European, as tested by the dynamometer, is 
greater than that of the New Zealander. But all these are 
instances of excessive development of particular capacities and 
faculties at the expense of general vital power. Expose 
untamed and domesticated forms of life, together, to an entire 
set of physical conditions equally alien to the former habits of 
both, so that every power of resistance and accommodation 
shall be called into action, and the wild plant or animal will 
live, while the domesticated will perish. 

The saline atmosphere of the sea is specially injurious both 
to seeds and to very many young plants, and it is only recently 

* Tempests, violent enough to destroy all cultivated plants, often spare 
those of spontaneous growth. During the present summer, I have seen in 
Northern Italy, vineyards, maize fields, mulberry and fruit trees completely 
stripped of their foliage by hail, while the forest trees scattered through 
the meadows, and the shrubs and brambles which sprang up by the way- 
side, passed through the ordeal with scarcely the loss of a leaflet. 

t The boar spear is provided with a short crossbar, to enable the 
hunter to keep the infuriated animal at bay after he has transfixed him. 


70 


EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLES. 


that the transportation of some very important vegetables 
across the ocean has been made practicable, through the 
invention of Ward’s airtight glass cases. It is by this means 
that large numbers of the trees which produce the Jesuit’s 
bark have been successfully transplanted from America to the 
British possessions in the East, where it is hoped they will be¬ 
come fully naturalized. 

Extirpation of Vegetables. 

Lamentable as are the evils produced by the too general 
felling of the woods in the Old World, I believe it does not 
satisfactorily appear that any species of native forest tree has 
yet been extirpated by man on the Eastern continent. The 
roots, stumps, trunks, and foliage found in bogs are recognized 
as belonging to still extant species. Except in some few cases 
where there is historical evidence that foreign material was 
employed, the timber of the oldest European buildings, and 
even of the lacustrine habitations of Switzerland, is evidently 
the product of trees still common in or near the countries 
where such architectural remains are found; nor have the 
Egyptian catacombs themselves revealed to us the former 
existence of any woods not now familiar to us as the growth of 
still living trees.* It is, however, said that the yew tree> 
Taxus baceata , formerly very common in England, Germany, 
and—as we are authorized to infer from Theophrastus—in 
Greece, has almost wholly disappeared from the latter country, 
and seems to be dying out in Germany. The wood of the 
yew surpasses that of any other European tree in closeness 
and fineness of grain, and it is well known for the elasticity 
which of old made it so great a favorite with the English 

* Some botanists think that a species of water lily represented in many 
Egyptian tombs has become extinct, and the papyrus, which must have 
once been abundant in Egypt, is now found only in a very few localities 
near the mouth of the Nile. It grows very well and ripens its seeds in the 
waters of the Anapus near Syracuse, and I have seen it in garden ponds at 
Messina and in Malta. There is no apparent reason for believing that it 
could not be easily cultivated in Egypt, to any extent, if there were any 
special motive for encouraging its growth. 


EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLES. 


71 


archer. It is much in request among wood carvers and turn¬ 
ers, and the demand for it explains, in part, its increasing 
scarcity. It is also worth remarking that no insect depends 
upon it for food or shelter, or aids in its fructification, no bird 
feeds upon its berries—the latter a circumstance of some 
importance, because the tree hence wants one means of propa¬ 
gation or diffusion common to so many other plants. But it 
is alleged that the reproductive power of the yew is exhausted, 
and that it can no longer be readily propagated by the natural 
sowing of its seeds, or by artificial methods. If further inves¬ 
tigation and careful experiment should establish this fact, it 
will go far to show that a climatic change, of a character unfa¬ 
vorable to the growth of the yew, has really taken place in 
Germany, though not yet proved by instrumental observation, 
and the most probable cause of such change would be found 
in the diminution of the area covered by the forests. 

The industry of man is said to have been so successful in the 
local extirpation of noxious or useless vegetables in China, that, 
with the exception of a few water plants in the rice grounds, it 
is sometimes impossible to find a single weed in an extensive 
district; and the late eminent agriculturist, Mr. Coke, is report¬ 
ed to have offered in vain a considerable reward for the detection 
of a weed in a large wheatfield on his estate in England. In 
these cases, however, there is no reason to suppose that dili¬ 
gent husbandry has done more than to eradicate the pests of 
agriculture within a comparatively limited area, and the cockle 
and the darnel will probably remain to plague the slovenly 
cultivator as long as the cereal grains continue to bless him.* 

* Although it is not known that man has extirpated any vegetable, the 
mysterious diseases which have, for the last twenty years, so injuriously 
affected the potato, the vine, the orange, the olive, and silk husbandry— 
whether in this case the malady resides in the mulberry or in the insect- 
are ascribed by some to a climatic deterioration produced by excessive de¬ 
struction of the woods. As will be seen in the next chapter, a retardation 
in the period of spring has been observed in numerous localities in South¬ 
ern Europe, as well as in the United States. This change has been 
thought to favor the multiplication of the obscure parasites which cause 
the injury to the vegetables just mentioned. 

Babinet supposes the parasites which attack the grape and the potato 


72 


ORIGIN OF DOMESTIC PLANTS. 


Origin of Domestic Plants. 

One of the most important, and, at the same time, most 
difficult questions connected with our subject is: how far we 
are to regard our cereal grains, our esculent bulbs and roots, 
and the multiplied tree fruits of our gardens, as artificially 


to be animal, not vegetable, and he ascribes their multiplication to exces¬ 
sive manuring and stimulation of the growth of the plants on which 
they live. They are now generally, if not universally, regarded* as vegeta¬ 
ble, and if they are so, Babinet’s theory would be even more plausible than 
on his own supposition .—Etudes et Lectures , ii, p. 269. 

It is a fact of some interest in agricultural economy, that the oidium, 
which is so destructive to the grape, has produced no pecuniary loss to the 
proprietors of the vineyards in France. “ The price of wine,” says La- 
vergne, “has quintupled, and as the product of the vintage has not dimin¬ 
ished in the same proportion, the crisis has been, on the whole, rather ad¬ 
vantageous than detrimental to the country .”—Economic Rurale de la 
France , pp. 263, 264. 

France produces a considerable surplus of wines for exportation, and 
the sales to foreign consumers are the principal source of profit to French 
vinegrowers. In Northern Italy, on the contrary, which exports little 
wine, there has been no such increase in the price of wine as to compen¬ 
sate the great diminution in the yield of the vines, and the loss of this har¬ 
vest is severely felt. In Sicily, however, which exports much wine, prices 
have risen as rapidly as in France. Waltershausen informs us that in the 
years 1838-42, the red wine of Mount Etna sold at the rate of one 
kreazer and a half, or one cent the bottle, and sometimes even at but two 
thirds that price, but that at present it commands five or six times as 
much. 

The grape disease has operated severely on small cultivators whose 
vineyards only furnished a supply for domestic use, but Sicily has received 
a compensation in the immense increase which it has occasioned in both 
the product and the profits of the sulphur mines. Flour of sulphur is ap¬ 
plied to the vine as a remedy against the disease, and the operation is 
repeated from two to three or four—and even, it is said, eight or ten times, 
in a season. Hence there is a great demand for sulphur in all the vine¬ 
growing countries of Europe, and Waltershausen estimates the annual 
consumption of that mineral for this single purpose at 850,000 centner , or 
more than forty thousand tons. The price of sulphur has risen in about 
the same proportion as that of wine.— Waltershattsen, Ueber den Sicil- 
ianiscJicn Ackerbau , pp. 19, 20. 


ORIGIN OF DOMESTIC PLANTS. 


73 


modified and improved forms of wild, self-propagating vege¬ 
tation. The narratives of botanical travellers have often 
announced the discovery of the original form and habitat of 
domesticated plants, and scientific journals have described the 
experiments by which the identity of particular wild and cul¬ 
tivated vegetables has been thought to be established. It is 
confidently affirmed that maize and the potato—which we 
must suppose to have been first cultivated at a much later 
period than the breadstuff's and most other esculent vegetables 
of Europe and the East—are found wild and self-propagating 
in Spanish America, though in forms not recognizable by the 
common observer as identical with the familiar corn and tuber 
of modern agriculture. It was lately asserted, upon w T hat 
seemed very strong evidence, that the JEgilops ovata , a plant 
growing wild in Southern France, had been actually converted 
into common wheat; but, upon a repetition of the experi¬ 
ments, later observers have declared that the apparent change 
was only a case of temporary hybridation or fecundation by 
the pollen of true wheat, and that the grass alleged to be trans¬ 
formed into wheat could not be perpetuated as such from its 
own seed. 

The very great modifications which cultivated plants are 
constantly undergoing under our eyes, and the numerous 
varieties and races which spring up among them, certainly 
countenance the doctrine, that every domesticated vegetable, 
however dependent upon human care for growth and propaga¬ 
tion in its present form, may have been really derived, by a 
long succession of changes, from some wild plant not now 
much resembling it. But it is, in every case, a question of 
evidence. The only satisfactory proof that a given wild plant 
is identical with a given garden or field vegetable, is the test 
of experiment, the actual growing of the one from the seed of 
the other, or the conversion of the one into the other by trans¬ 
plantation and change of conditions. It is hardly contended 
that any of the cereals or other plants important as human 
aliment, or as objects of agricultural industry, exist and propa¬ 
gate themselves uncultivated in the same form and with the 


74 


ORIGIN OF DOMESTIC l’LANTS. 


same properties as when sown and reared by human art.* In 
fact, the cases are rare where the identity of a wild with a 
domesticated plant is considered by the best authorities as con¬ 
clusively established, and we are warranted in affirming of but 
few of the latter, as a historically known or experimentally 
proved fact, that they ever did exist, or could exist, independ¬ 
ently of man.f 


* Some recent observations of the learned traveller Wetzstein are 
worthy of special notice. u The soil of the Haurun,” he remarks, “ produces, 
in its primitive condition, mucb wild rye, which is not known as a culti¬ 
vated plant in Syria, and much wild barley and oats. These cereals pre¬ 
cisely resemble the corresponding cultivated plants in leaf, ear, size, and 
height of straw, but their grains are sensibly flatter and poorer in flour.”— 
Reisebericht uber Haurdn und die Trachonen , p. 40. 

t This remark is much less applicable to fruit trees than to garden vege¬ 
tables and the cerealia. The wild orange of Florida, though once consid¬ 
ered indigenous, is now generally thought by botanists to be descended 
from the European orange introduced by the early colonists. The fig and 
the olive are found growing wild in every country where those trees are 
cultivated. The wild fig differs from the domesticated in its habits, its 
season of fructification, and its insect population, but is, I believe, not 
specifically distinguishable from the garden fig, though I do not know that 
it is reclaimable by cultivation. The wild olive, which is so abundant in 
the Tuscan Haremma, produces good fruit without further care, when 
thinned out and freed from the shade of other trees, and is particu¬ 
larly suited for grafting. See Salvagnoli, Memorie sulle Maremme , pp. 
63-73. 

Fkaas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit , pp. 35-38, gives, upon the 
authority of Link and other botanical writers, a list of the native habitats 
of most cereals and of many fruits, or at least of localities where these 
plants are said to be now found wild ; but the data do not appear to rest, 
in general, upon very trustworthy evidence. Theoretically, there can be 
little doubt that all our cultivated plants are modified forms of spontaneous 
vegetation, but the connection is not historically shown, nor are we able to 
say that the originals of some domesticated vegetables may not be now ex¬ 
tinct and unrepresented in the existing wild flora. See, on this subject, 
Humboldt, Amichten der Natur, i, pp. 208, 209. The following are inter¬ 
esting incidents: “ A negro slave of the great Cortez was the first who 
sowed wheat in New Spain. He found three grains of it among the rice 
which had been brought from Spain as food for the soldiers. In the Fran¬ 
ciscan monastery at Quito, I saw the earthen pot which contained the first 


LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AGENCY. 


75 


Organic Life as a Geological and Geographical Agency. 

Tlie quantitative value of organic life, as a geological 
agency, seems to be inversely as the volume of the individual 
organism ; for nature supplies by numbers what is wanting in 
the bulk of the plant or animal out of whose remains or struc¬ 
tures she forms strata covering whole provinces, and builds 
up from the depths of the sea large islands, if not continents. 
There are, it is true, near the mouths of the great Siberian 
rivers which empty themselves into the Polar Sea, drift islands 
composed, in an incredibly large proportion, of the bones and 
tusks of elephants, mastodons, and other huge pachyderms, 
and many extensive caves in various parts of the world are 
half filled with the skeletons of quadrupeds, sometimes lying 
loose in the earth, sometimes cemented together into an osse¬ 
ous breccia by a calcareous deposit or other binding material. 
These remains of large animals, though found in comparatively 
late formations, generally belong to extinct species, and their 
modern congeners or representatives do not exist in sufficient 
numbers to be of sensible importance in geology or in geog¬ 
raphy by the mere mass of their skeletons.* But the vegetable 

wheat sown there by Friar Jodoco Rixi, of Ghent. It was preserved as a 
relic.” 

The Adams of modern botany and zoology have been put to hard shifts in 
finding names for the multiplied organisms which the Creator has brought 
before them, “ to see what they would call themand naturalists and 
philosophers have shown much moral courage in setting at naught the laws 
of philology in the coinage of uncouth words to express scientific ideas. It 
is much to be wished that some bold neologist would devise English tech¬ 
nical equivalents for the German verwildert , run-wild, and veredelt , im¬ 
proved by cultivation. 

* Could the bones and other relics of the domestic quadrupeds destroyed 
by disease or slaughtered for human use in civilized countries be collected 
into large deposits, as obscure causes have gathered together those of ex¬ 
tinct animals, they would soon form aggregations which might almost be 
called mountains. There were in the United States, in 1860, as we shall 
see hereafter, nearly one hundred and two millions of horses, black cattle, 
sheep, and swine. There are great numbers of all the same animals in the 
British American Provinces and in Mexico, and there are large herds of 


76 


LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AGENCY. 


products found with them, and, in rare cases, in the stomachs 
of some of them, are those of yet extant plants; and besides 
this evidence, the recent discovery of works of human art, 

wild horses on the plains, and of tamed among the independent Indian 
tribes of North America. It would perhaps not be extravagant to suppose 
that all these cattle may amount to two thirds as many as those of the 
United States, and thus we have in North America a total of 170,000,000 
domestic quadrupeds belonging to species introduced by European coloni¬ 
zation, besides dogs, cats, and other four-footed household pets and pests, 
also of foreign origin. 

If we allow half a solid foot to the skeleton and other slowly destruc¬ 
tible parts of each animal, the remains of these herds would form a cubical 
mass measuring not much short of four hundred and fifty feet to the side, 
or a pyramid equal in dimensions to that of Cheops, and as the average life 
of these animals does not exceed six or seven years, the accumulations of 
their bones, horns, hoofs, and other durable remains would amount to at 
least fifteen times as great a volume in a single century. It is true that 
the actual mass of solid matter, left by the decay of dead domestic quadru¬ 
peds and permanently added to the crust of the earth, is not so great as 
this calculation makes it. The greatest proportion of the soft parts of do¬ 
mestic animals, and even of the bones, is soon decomposed, through direct 
consumption by man and other carnivora, industrial use, and employment 
as manure, and enters into new combinations in which its animal origin is 
scarcely traceable ; there is, nevertheless, a large annual residuum, which, 
like decayed vegetable matter, becomes a part of the superficial mould; 
and in any event, brute life immensely changes the form and character of 
the superficial strata, if it does not sensibly augment the quantity of the 
matter composing them. 

The remains of man, too, add to the earthy coating that covers the 
face of the globe. The human bodies deposited in the catacombs during 
the long, long ages of Egyptian history, would perhaps build as large a 
pile as one generation of the quadrupeds of the United States. In the 
barbarous days of old Moslem warfare, the conquerors erected large pyra¬ 
mids of human skulls. The soil of cemeteries in the great cities of Europe 
has sometimes been raised several feet by the deposit of the dead during a 
few generations. In the East, Turks and Christians alike bury bodies but 
a couple of feet beneath the surface. The grave is respected as long as the 
tombstone remains, but the sepultures of the ignoble poor, and of those 
whose monuments time or accident has removed, are opened again and 
again to receive fresh occupants. Hence the ground in Oriental cemeteries 
is pervaded with relics of humanity, if not wholly composed of them; and 
an examination of the soil of the lower part of the Petit Champ cles Marts 


GEOGRAPHICAL IMPORTANCE OF ANIMALS. 77 

deposited in juxtaposition witli fossil bones, and evidently at 
the same time and by the same agency which buried these 
latter—not to speak of alleged human bones found in the same 
strata—proves that the animals whose former existence they 
testify were contemporaneous with man, and possibly even 
extirpated by him.* I do not propose to enter upon the 
thorny question, whether the existing races of man are genea¬ 
logically connected with these ancient types of humanity, and 
I advert to these facts only for the sake of the suggestion, that 
man, in his earliest known stages of existence, was probably 
a destructive power upon the earth, though perhaps not so 
emphatically as his present representatives. 

The larger wild animals are not now numerous enough in 
any one region to form extensive deposits by their remains; 
but they have, nevertheless, a certain geographical importance. 

at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the observer that it consists almost 
exclusively of the comminuted bones of his fellow man. 

* It is asserted that the bones of mammoths and mastodons, in many 
instances, appear to havo been grazed or cut by flint arrow-heads or other 
stone weapons. These accounts have often been discredited, because it 
has been assumed that the extinction of these animals was more ancient 
than the existence of man. Recent discoveries render it highly probable, 
if not certain, that this conclusion has been too hastily adopted. Lyell 
observes : “ These stories * * must in future be more carefully inquired 

into, for we can scarcely doubt that the mastodon in North America lived 
down to a period when the mammoth coexisted with man in Europe.”— 
Antiquity of Man, p. 354. 

On page 143 of the volume just quoted, the same very distinguished 
writer remarks that man “ no doubt played his part in hastening the era 
of the extinction ” of the large pachyderms and beasts of prey; but, as 
contemporaneous species of other animals, which man cannot be supposed 
to have extirpated, have also become extinct, he argues that the disap¬ 
pearance of the quadrupeds in question cannot be ascribed to human 
action alone. 

On this point it may be observed that, as we cannot know what precise 
physical conditions were necessary to the existence of a given extinct or¬ 
ganism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified 
by the action of man, and he may therefore have influenced the life of 
such organisms in ways, and to an extent, of which we can form no 
just idea. 


78 ACTION OF WILD ANIMALS ON VEGETATION. 

If tlie myriads of large browsing and grazing quadrupeds 
which wander over the plains of Southern Africa and the 
slaughter of which by thousands is the source of a ferocious 
pleasure and a brutal triumph to professedly civilized hunters 
—if the herds of the American bison, which are numbered by 
hundreds of thousands, do not produce visible changes in the 
forms of terrestrial surface, they have at least an immense 
influence on the growth and distribution of vegetable life, and, 
of course, indirectly upon all the physical conditions of soil 
and climate between which and vegetation a mutual inter¬ 
dependence exists. 

The influence of wild quadrupeds upon vegetable life has 
been little studied, and not many facts bearing upon it have 
been recorded, but, so far as it is knowm, it appears to be con¬ 
servative rather than pernicious.* Few if any of them depend 
for their subsistence on vegetable products obtainable only by 
the destruction of the plant, and they seem to confine their 
consumption almost exclusively to the annual harvest of leaf 
or twig, or at least of parts of the vegetable easily reproduced. 
If there are exceptions to this rule, they are in cases where the 
numbers of the animal are so proportioned to the abundance 
of the vegetable, that there is no danger of the extermination 
of the plant from the voracity of the quadruped, or of the 
extinction of the quadruped from the scarcity of the plant. 
In diet and natural wants the bison resembles the ox, the ibex 

* Evelyn thought the depasturing of grass by cattle serviceable to its 
growth. “ The biting of cattle,” he remarks, “gives a gentle loosening to 
the roots of the herbage, and makes it to grow fine and sweet, and their 
very breath and treading as well as soil, and the comfort of their warm 
bodies, is wholesome and marvellously cherishing.”— Terra , or Philosoph¬ 
ical Discourse of Earth, p. 86. 

In a note upon this passage, Hunter observes: “ Nice farmers con¬ 
sider the lying of a beast upon the ground, for one night only, as a suffi¬ 
cient tilth for the year. The breath of graminivorous quadrupeds does 
certainly enrich the roots of grass ; a circumstance worthy of the attention 
of the philosophical farmer.”— Terra , same page. 

The “ philosophical farmer ” of the present day will not adopt these 
opinions without some qualification. 


DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 


79 


and the chamois assimilate themselves to the goat and the 
sheep; but while the wild animal does not appear to be a 
destructive agency in the garden of nature, his domestic con¬ 
geners are eminently so. This is partly from the change of 
habits resulting from domestication and association with man, 
partly from the fact that the number of reclaimed animals is 
not determined by the natural relation of demand and spon¬ 
taneous supply which regulates the multiplication of wild 
creatures, but by the convenience of man, who is, in compara¬ 
tively few things, amenable to the control of the merely phys¬ 
ical arrangements of nature. When the domesticated animal 
escapes from human jurisdiction, as in the case of the ox, the 
horse, the goat, and perhaps the ass—which, so far as I know, 
are the only well-authenticated instances of the complete 
emancipation of household quadrupeds—he becomes again an 
unresisting subject of nature, and all his economy is governed 
by the same laws as that of his fellows which have never been 
enslaved by man; but, so long as he obeys a human lord, he 
is an auxiliary in the warfare his master is ever waging against 
all existences except those which he can tame to a willing 
servitude. 

Number of Quadrupeds in the United States. 

Civilization is so intimately associated with, if not depend¬ 
ent upon, certain inferior forms of animal life, that cultivated 
man has never failed to accompany himself, in all his migra¬ 
tions, with some of these humble attendants. The ox, the horse, 
the sheep, and even the comparatively useless dog and cat, as 
well as several species of poultry, are voluntarily transported 
by every emigrant colony, and they soon multiply to numbers 
very far exceeding those of the wild genera most nearly corre¬ 
sponding to them.* According to the census of the United 

* The rat and the mouse, though not voluntarily transported, are pas¬ 
sengers by every ship that sails from Europe to a foreign port, and several 
species of these quadrupeds have, consequently, much extended their 
range and increased their numbers in modern times. From a story of 
Heliogabalus related by Lampridius, Hist. Avg. Scriptores , ed. Casaubon, 


80 


NUMBER OF QUADRUPEDS IN THE UNITED STATES. 


States for I860,* the total number of horses in all the States 
of the American Union, was, in round numbers, 7,800,000 ; 
of asses and mules, 1,800,000; of the ox tribe, 29,000,000 ;f ot 
sheep, 25,000,000 ; and of swine, 89,000,000. The only North 

1690, p. 110, it would seem that mice at least were not very common in 
ancient Rome. Among the capricious freaks of that emperor, it is said 
that he undertook to investigate the statistics of the arachnoid population 
of the capital, and that 10,000 pounds of spiders (or spiders’ webs—for 
aranea is equivocal) were readily collected; hut when he got up a mouso 
show, he thought ten thousand mice a very fair number. I believe as 
many might almost be found in a single palace in modern Rome. Rats are 
not less numerous in all great cities, and in Paris, where their skins are 
used for gloves, and their flesh, it is whispered, in some very complex and 
equivocal dishes, they are caught by legions. I have read of a manufac¬ 
turer who contracted to buy of the rat catchers, at a high price, all the 
rat skins they could furnish before a certain date, and failed, within a week, 
for want of capital, when the stock of peltry had run up to 600,000. 

* Bigelow, Les fitats Unis en 1863, pp. 379, 380. In the same para¬ 
graph this volume states the number of animals slaughtered in the United 
States by butchers, in 1859, at 212,871,653. This is an error of the press. 
Number is confounded with value. A reference to the tables of the census 
shows that the animals slaughtered that year were estimated at 212,871,653 
dollars ; the number of head is not given. The wild horses and horned 
cattle of the prairies and the horses of the Indians are not included in 
the returns. 

t Of this total number, 2,240,000, or nearly nine per cent., are reported 
as working oxen. This would strike European, and especially English 
agriculturists, as a large proportion ; but it is explained by the difference 
between a new country and an old, in the conditions which determine the 
employment of animal labor. Oxen are very generally used in the United 
States and Canada for hauling timber and firewood through and from tho 
forests; for ploughing in ground still full of rocks, stumps, and roots ; for 
breaking up the new soil of the prairies with its strong matting of native 
grasses, and for the transportation of heavy loads over the rough roads of 
the interior. In all these cases, the frequent obstructions to the passage 
of the timber, the plough, and the sled or cart, are a source of constant 
danger to the animals, the vehicles, and the harness, and the slow and 
steady step of the ox is attended with much less risk than the swift and 
sudden movements of the impatient horse. It is surprising to see the 
sagacity with which the dull and clumsy ox—hampered as he is by the 
rigid yoke, the most absurd implement of draught ever contrived by man— 
picks his way, when once trained to forest work, among rocks and roots, 


NUMBERS OF WILD QUADRUPEDS. 


81 


American quadruped sufficiently gregarious in habits, or suffi¬ 
ciently multiplied in numbers, to form really large herds, is the 
bison, or, as he is commonly called in America, the buffalo; and 
this animal is confined to the prairie region of the Mississippi 
basin and Northern Mexico. The engineers sent out to survey 
railroad routes to the Pacific estimated the number of a single 
herd of bisons seen within the last ten years on the great plains 
near the Upper Missouri, at not less than 200,000, and yet the 
range occupied by this animal is now very much smaller in 
area than it was when the whites first established themselves 
on the prairies.* But it must be remarked that the American 
buffalo is a migratory animal, and that, at the season of his 
annual journeys, the whole stock of a vast extent of pasture 
ground is collected into a single army, which is seen at or 
very near any one point only for a few days during the entire 
season. Hence there is risk of great error in estimating the 
numbers of the bison in a given district from the magnitude 
of the herds seen at or about the same time at a single place 
of observation ; and, upon the whole, it is neither proved nor 
probable that the bison was ever, at any one time, as numerous 
in North America as the domestic bovine species is at present. 
The elk, the moose, the musk ox, the caribou, and the smaller 
quadrupeds popularly embraced under the general name of 
deer,f though sufficient for the wants of a sparse savage popu- 

and even climbs over fallen trees, not only moving safely, but drawing 
timber over ground wholly impracticable for the light and agile horse. 

Oows, so constantly employed for draught in Italy, are never yoked or 
otherwise used for labor in America, except in the Slave States. 

* “ About five miles from camp we ascended to the top of a high hill, 
and for a great distance ahead every square mile seemed to have a herd of 
buffalo upon it. Their number was variously estimated by the members 
of the party; by some as high as half a million. I do not think it any exag¬ 
geration to set it down at 200,000.”— Stevens’s Narrative and Final Re¬ 
port. Reports of Explorations and Surveys for Railroad to Pacific , vol. xii, 
book i, 1860. 

The next day, the party fell in with a “ buffalo trail,” where at least 
100,000 were thought to have crossed a slough. 

f The most zealous and successful New England hunter of whom I have 

G 


82 


ORIGIN OF DOMESTIC QUADRUPEDS. 


lation, were never numerically very abundant, and the car¬ 
nivora which fed upon them were still less so. It is almost 
needless to add that the Rocky Mountain sheep and goat must 
always have been very rare. 

Summing up the whole, then, it is evident that the wild 
quadrupeds of North America, even when most numerous, 
were few compared with their domestic successors, that they 
required a much less supply of vegetable food, and conse¬ 
quently were far less important as geographical elements than 
the many millions of hoofed and horned cattle now fed by 
civilized man on the same continent. 

Origin and Transfer of Domestic Quadrupeds. 

Of the origin of our domestic animals, we know histor¬ 
ically nothing, because their domestication belongs to the ages 
which preceded written history ; but though they cannot all 
be specifically identified with now extant wild animals, it is 
presumable that they have been reclaimed from an originally 
wild state. Ancient annalists have preserved to us fewer data 
respecting the introduction of domestic animals into new coun¬ 
tries than respecting the transplantation of domestic vegetables. 
Ritter, in his learned essay on the camel, has shown that this 
animal was not employed by the Egyptians until a compara¬ 
tively late period in their history ; that he was unknown to 
the Carthaginians until after the downfall of their common¬ 
wealth ; and that his first appearance in Western Africa is 
more recent still. The Bactrian camel was certainly brought 

any personal knowledge, and who continued to indulge his favorite passion 
much heyond the age which generally terminates exploits in woodcraft, 
lamented on his deathbed that he had not lived long enough to carry up 
the record of his slaughtered deer to the number of one thousand, which 
he had fixed as the limit of his ambition. He was able to handle the rifle, 
for sixty years, at a period when the game was still nearly as abundant as 
ever, but had killed only nine hundred and sixty of these quadrupeds, of 
all species. The exploits of this Nimrod have been far exceeded by prairie 
hunters, hut I doubt whether, in the originally wooded territory of the 
Union, any single marksman has brought down a larger number. 


INTRODUCTION OF DOMESTIC QUADRUPEDS. 


83 


from Asia Minor to the Northern shores of the Black Sea, by 
the Goths, in the third or fourth century.* The Arabian 
single-humped camel, or dromedary, has been carried to the 
Canary Islands, partially introduced into Australia, Greece, 
Spain, and even Tuscany, experimented upon to little purpose 
in Venezuela, and finally imported by the American Govern¬ 
ment into Texas and New Mexico, where it finds the climate 
and the vegetable products best suited to its wants, and prom¬ 
ises to become a very useful agent in the promotion of the 
special civilization for which those regions are adapted. 
America had no domestic quadruped but a species of dog, the 
lama tribe, and, to a certain extent, the bison or buffalo.f Of 
course, it owes the horse, the ass, the ox, the sheep, the goat, 
and the swine, as does also Australia, to European coloniza¬ 
tion. Modern Europe has, thus far, not accomplished much 
in the way of importation of new animals, though some inter¬ 
esting essays have been made. The reindeer was successfully 
introduced into Iceland about a century ago, while similar 
attempts failed, about the same time, in Scotland. The Cash- 
mere or Thibet goat was brought to France a generation since, 
and succeeds well. The same or an allied species and the 
Asiatic buffalo were carried to South Carolina about the year 
1850, and the former, at least, is thought likely to prove of 
permanent value in the United States. The yak, or Tartary ox, 
seems to thrive in France, and success has attended the recent 
efforts to introduce the South American alpaca into Europe. 

* ErdTcunde , viii, Asien , 1 ste Abtheilung , pp. 660, 758. 

f See chapter iii, post; also Humboldt, AnsicJiten der Natur , i, p. 71. 
From the anatomical character of the bones of the urus, or anerochs, 
found among the relics of the lacustrine population of ancient Switzerland, 
and from other circumstances, it is inferred that this animal had been do¬ 
mesticated by that people ; and it is stated, I know not upon what author¬ 
ity, in Le Alpi c?ie cingono VItalia, that it had been tamed by the Yeneti 
also. See Ltell, Antiquity of Man, pp. 24, 25, and the last-named work, 
p. 489. This is a fact of much interest, because it is, I believe, the only 
known instance of the extinction of a domestic quadruped, and the extreme 
improbability of such an event gives some countenance to the theory of 
the identity of the domestic ox with, and ivs descent from, the urus. 


84 


NUMBERS OF "WILD ANIMALS. 


Extirpation of Quadrupeds. 

Although man never fails greatly to diminish, and is per¬ 
haps destined ultimately to exterminate, such of the larger wild 
quadrupeds as he cannot profitably domesticate, yet their num¬ 
bers often fluctuate, and even after they seem almost extinct, 
they sometimes suddenly increase, without any intentional 
steps to promote such a result on his part. During the wars 
which followed the French Revolution, the wolf multiplied in 
many parts of Europe, partly because the hunters were with¬ 
drawn from the woods to chase a nobler game, and partly 
because the bodies of slain men and horses supplied this vora¬ 
cious quadruped with more abundant food. The same animal 
became again more numerous in Poland after the general dis¬ 
arming of the rural population by the Russian Government. 
On the other hand, when the hunters pursue the wolf, the 
graminivorous wild quadrupeds increase, and thus in turn pro¬ 
mote the multiplication of their great four-footed destroyer by 
augmenting the supply of his nourishment. So long as the 
fur of the beaver was extensively employed as a material for 
fine hats, it bore a very high price, and the chase of this quad¬ 
ruped was so keen that naturalists feared its speedy extinction. 
When a Parisian manufacturer invented the silk hat, which 
soon came into almost universal use, the demand for beavers’ 
fur fell off, and this animal—whose habits, as we have seen, are 
an important agency in the formation of bogs and other modi¬ 
fications of forest nature—immediately began to increase, reap¬ 
peared in haunts which he had long abandoned, and can no 
longer be regarded as rare enough to be in immediate danger 
of extirpation. Thus the convenience or the caprice of Parisian 
fashion has unconsciously exercised an influence which may 
sensibly affect the physical geography of a distant continent. 

Since the invention of gunpowder, some quadrupeds have 
completely disappeared from many European and Asiatic 
countries where they were formerly numerous. The last wolf 
was killed in Great Britain two hundred years ago, and the 
bear was extirpated from that island still earlier. The British 


EXTIRPATION OF WILD ANIMALS. 


85 


wild ox exists only in a few English and Scottish parks, while 
in Irish hogs, of no great apparent antiquity, are found antlers 
which testify to the former existence of a stag much larger 
than any extant European species. The lion is believed to 
have inhabited Asia Minor and Syria, and probably Greece 
and Sicily also, long after the commencement of the historical 
period, and he is even said to have been not yet extinct in the 
first-named two of these countries at the time of the first Cru¬ 
sades.* Two large graminivorous or browsing quadrupeds, 
the ur and the schelk, once common in Germany, are utterly 
extinct, the eland and the auerochs nearly so. The Nibelun- 
gen-Lied, which, in the oldest form preserved to us, dates from 
about the year 1,200, though its original composition no doubt 
belongs to an earlier period, thus sings: 

dHmr slobc ilje bobgl^ie Higfrib a fobeirt anb aa elk, 

|k smote four stowte urorea anb a grim anb sturbie scjjelk.f 

Modern naturalists identify the elk with the eland, the wisent 
with the auerochs. The period when the ur and the schelk 
became extinct is not known. The auerochs survived in 
Prussia until the middle of the last century, but unless it is 
identical with a similar quadruped said to be found on the 
Caucasus, it now exists only in the Russian imperial forest of 

* In maintaining the recent existence of the lion in the countries 
named in the text, naturalists have, perhaps, laid too much weight on the 
frequent occurrence of representations of this animal in sculptures appar¬ 
ently of a historical character. It will not do to argue, twenty centuries 
hence, that the lion and the unicorn were common in Great Britain in 
Queen Victoria’s time, because they are often seen “fighting for the 
crown ” in the carvings and paintings of that period. 

f gar nacfr slbgcr stljkre. dnen krismt frnf rklp 

Slardjrr ban him. fiat dam grimmm sdjtklj. 

XVI Auentiure. 

The testimony of the Mbelungen-Lied is not conclusive evidence that 
these quadrupeds existed in Germany at the time of the composition of 
that poem. It proves too much ; for, a few lines above those just quoted, 
Sigfrid is said to have killed a lion, an animal which the most patriotic 
Teuton will hardly claim as a denizen of mediaeval Germany. 


86 


DOMESTIC FOWLS-THE WILD PIGEON. 


Bialowitz, where about a thousand are still preserved, and in 
some great menageries, as for example that at Schonbrunn, 
near Vienna, which, in 1852, had four specimens. The eland, 
which is closely allied to the American wapiti, if not specific¬ 
ally the same animal, is still kept in the royal preserves of 
Prussia, to the number of four or five hundred individuals. 
The chamois is becoming rare, and the ibex or steinbock, once 
common in all the high Alps, is now believed to be confined 
to the Cogne mountains in Piedmont, between the valleys of 
the Dora Baltea and the Oreo. 

Number of Birds in the United States. 

The tame fowls play a much less conspicuous part in rural 
life than the quadrupeds, and in their relations to the economy 
of nature, they are of very much less moment than four-footed 
animals, or than the undomesticated birds. The domestic 
turkey * is probably more numerous in the territory of the 
United States than the wild bird of the same species ever was, 
and the grouse cannot, at the period of their greatest abun¬ 
dance, have counted as many as we now number of the com¬ 
mon hen. The dove, however, must fall greatly short of the 
wild pigeon in multitude, and it is hardly probable that the 
flocks of domestic geese and ducks are as numerous as once 
were those of their wild congeners. The pigeon, indeed, 
seems to have multiplied immensely, for some years after the 
first clearings in the woods, because the settlers warred unspar¬ 
ingly upon the hawk, while the crops of grain and other vege¬ 
table growths increased the supply of food within the reach of 
the young birds, at the age when their power of flight is not 

* The wild turkey takes readily to the water, and is able to cross rivers 
of very considerable width by swimming. By way of giving me an idea of 
the former abundance of this bird, an old and highly respectable gentle¬ 
man who was among the early white settlers of the 'West, told me that he 
once counted, in walking down the northern bank of the Ohio River, within 
a distance of four miles, eighty-four turkeys as they landed singly, or at 
most in pairs, after swimming over from the Kentucky side. 


INFLUENCE OF BIKES ON VEGETATION-AS SEED-SOWERS. 87 

yet great enough to enable them to seek it over a wide area.* 
The pigeon is not described by the earliest wdiite inhabitants 
of the American States as filling the air with such clouds of 
winged life as astonish naturalists in the descriptions of Au¬ 
dubon, and, at the present day, the net and the gun have so 
reduced its abundance, that its appearance in large numbers is 
recorded only at long intervals, and it is never seen in the 
great flocks remembered by many still living observers as 
formerly very common. 


Birds as Sowers and Consumers of Seeds , and as 

Destroyers of Insects. 

Wild birds form of themselves a very conspicuous and 
interesting feature in the staffage , as painters call it, of the 
natural landscape, and they are important elements in the 
view we are taking of geography, whether we consider their 
immediate or their incidental influence. Birds affect vegeta¬ 
tion directly by sowing seeds and by consuming them; they 
affect it indirectly by destroying insects injurious, or, in some 
cases, beneficial to vegetable life. Hence, when we kill a seed¬ 
sowing bird, we check the dissemination of a plant; when we 
kill a bird which digests the seed it swallows, we promote the 
increase of a vegetable. Nature protects the seeds of wild, 
much more effectually than those of domesticated plants. The 
cereal grains are completely digested when consumed by birds, 
but the germ of the smaller stone fruits and of very many other 
wild vegetables is uninjured, perhaps even stimulated to more 
vigorous growth, by the natural chemistry of the bird’s stom¬ 
ach. The power of flight and the restless habits of the bird 
enable it to transport heavy seeds to far greater distances than 

* The wood pigeon has been observed to increase in numbers in Europe 
also, when pains have been taken to exterminate the hawk. The pigeons, 
which migrated in flocks so numerous that they were whole days in pass¬ 
ing a given point, were no doubt injurious to the grain, but probably less 
so than is generally supposed; for they did not confine themselves exclu¬ 
sively to the harvests for their nourishment. 


88 


BIRDS AS DESTROYERS OF INSECTS. 


they could be carried by tbe wind. A swift-winged bird may 
drop cberry stones a thousand miles from the tree they grow 
on ; a hawk, in tearing a pigeon, may scatter from its crop the 
still fresh rice it had swallowed at a distance of ten degrees of 
latitude,* and thus the occurrence of isolated plants in situations 
where their presence cannot otherwise well be explained, is 
easily accounted for. There is a large class of seeds apparently 
specially fitted by nature for dissemination by animals. 1 
refer to those which attach themselves, by means of hooks, or 
by viscous juices, to the coats of quadrupeds and the feathers 
of birds, and are thus transported w r herever their living vehi¬ 
cles may chance to wander. Some birds, too, deliberately 
bury seeds, not indeed with a foresight aiming directly at the 
propagation of the plant, but from apparently purposeless 
secretiveness, or as a mode of preserving food for future use. 

An unfortunate popular error greatly magnifies the injury 
done to the crops of grain and leguminous vegetables by wild 
birds. Very many of those generally supposed to consume 
large quantities of the seeds of cultivated plants really feed 
almost exclusively upon insects, and frequent the wheatfields, 
not for the sake of the grain, but for the eggs, larvae, and fly 
of the multiplied tribes of insect life which are so destructive 
to the harvests. This fact has been so well established by the 
examination of the stomachs of great numbers of birds in 
Europe and bTew England, at different seasons of the year, 
that it is no longer open to doubt, and it appears highly prob¬ 
able that even the species which consume more or less grain 
generally make amends, by destroying insects whose ravages 
would have been still more injurious.f On this subject, we 

* Pigeons were shot near Albany, in New York, a few years ago, with 
green rice in their crops, which it was thought must have been growing, a 
very few hours before, at the distance of seven or eight hundred miles. 

t Professor Treadwell, of Massachusetts, found that a half-grown 
American robin in confinement ate in one day sixty-eight earthworms, 
weighing together nearly once and a half as much as the bird himself, and 
another had previously starved upon a daily allowance of eight or ten 
worms, or about twenty per cent, of his own weight. The largest of these 


BIRDS AS DESTROYERS OF INSECTS. 


80 


have much other evidence besides that derived from dissection. 
Direct observation has shown, in many instances, that the 
destruction of wild birds has been followed by a great multi¬ 
plication of noxious insects, and, on the other hand, that these 
latter have been much reduced in numbers by the protection 
and increase of the birds that devour them. Many interesting 
facts of this nature have been collected by professed natural¬ 
ists, but I shall content myself with a few taken from familiar 
and generally accessible sources. The following extract is 
from Michelet, JO Oiseau pp. 169, 170 : 

“ The stingy farmer—an epithet justly and feelingly be¬ 
stowed by Yirgil. Avaricious, blind, indeed, who proscribes 
the birds—those destroyers of insects, those defenders of his 
harvests. Not a grain for the creature which, during the rains 
of winter, hunts the future insect, finds out the nests of the 

numbers appeared, so far as could be judged by watching parent birds of the 
same species, as they brought food to their young, to be much greater than 
that supplied to them when fed in the nest; for the old birds did not return 
with worms or insects oftener than once in ten minutes on an average. If 
we suppose the parents to hunt for food twelve hours in a day, and a nest 
to contain four young, we should have seventy-two worms, or eighteen 
each, as the daily supply of the brood. It is probable enough that some 
of the food collected by the parents may be more nutritious than the earth¬ 
worms, and consequently that a smaller quantity sufficed for the young in 
the nest than when reared under artificial conditions. 

The supply required by growing birds is not the measure of their wants 
after they have arrived at maturity, and it is not by any means certain 
that great muscular exertion always increases the demand for nourish¬ 
ment, either in the lower animals or in man. The members of the English 
Alpine Club are not distinguished for appetites which would make them 
unwelcome guests to Swiss landlords, and I think every man who has had 
the personal charge of field or railway hands, must have observed that 
laborers who spare their strength the least are not the most valiant 
trencher champions. During the period when imprisonment for debt 
was permitted in New England, persons confined in country jails had no 
specific allowance, and they were commonly fed without stint. I have 
often inquired concerning their diet, and been assured by the jailers that 
their prisoners, who were not provided with work or other means of exer¬ 
cise, consumed a considerably larger supply of food than common out-door 
laborers. 


90 


BIRDS AS DESTROYERS OF INSECTS. 


larvae, examines, turns over every leaf, and destroys, every 
day, thousands of incipient caterpillars. But sacks of corn for 
the mature insect, whole fields for the grasshoppers, "which the 
bird would have made war upon. With eyes fixed upon his 
furrow, upon the present moment only, without seeing and 
without foreseeing, blind to the great harmony which is never 
broken with impunity, he has everywhere demanded or ap¬ 
proved laws for the extermination of that necessary ally of his 
toil—the insectivorous bird. And the insect has well avenged 
the bird. It has become necessary to revoke in haste the pro¬ 
scription. In the Isle of Bourbon, for instance, a price was set 
on the head of the martin ; it disappeared, and the grasshop¬ 
pers took possession of the island, devouring, withering, scorch¬ 
ing with a biting drought all that they did not consume. In 
North America it has been the same with the starling, the 
protector of Indian corn.* Even the sparrow, which really 
does attack grain, but which protects it still more, the pilferer, 
the outlaw, loaded with abuse and smitten with curses—it has 
been found in Hungary that they were likely to perish without 
him, that he alone could sustain the mighty war against the 
beetles and the thousand winged enemies that swarm in the 
lowlands; they have revoked the decree of banishment, re¬ 
called in haste this valiant militia, which, though deficient in 
discipline, is nevertheless the salvation of the country.f 

* I hope Michelet has good authority for this statement, but I am un¬ 
able to confirm it. 

t Apropos of the sparrow—a single pair of which, according to Mich¬ 
elet, p. 315, carries to the nest four thousand and three hundred caterpil¬ 
lars or coleoptera in a week:—I take from the Record , an English religious 
newspaper, of December 15, 1862, the following article communicated to 
a country paper by a person who signs himself “A real friend to the 
farmer: ” 

“ Crawley Sparrow Club.-Tha annual dinner took place at the George 
Inn on Wednesday last. The first prize was awarded to Mr. I. Bedford, 
Worth, having destroyed within the last year 1,467. Mr. Heayman took 
the second with 1,448 destroyed. Mr. Stone, third, with 982 affixed. 
Total destroyed, 11,944. Old birds, 8,663; young ditto, 722; eggs, 2,556.” 

This trio of valiant fowlers, and their less fortunate—or rather less un- 


HOSTILITY TO BIRDS. 


91 


“ Not long since, in the neighborhood of Kouen and in the 
valley of Monville, the blackbird was for some time proscribed. 
The beetles profited well by this proscription; their larvae, 
infinitely multiplied, carried on their subterranean labors with 
such success, that a meadow was shown me, the surface of 
which was completely dried up, every herbaceous root was 
consumed, and the whole grassy mantle, easily loosened, might 
have been rolled up and carried away like a carpet.” 


Diminution and Extirpation of Birds. 

The general hostility of the European populace to the 
smaller birds is, in part, the remote effect of the reaction cre¬ 
ated by the game laws. When the restrictions imposed upon 
the chase by those laws were suddenly removed in France, 
the whole people at once commenced a destructive campaign 
against every species of wild animal. Arthur Young, writing 
in Provence, on the 30th of August, 1789, soon after the 
National Assembly had declared the chase free, thus com¬ 
plains of the annoyance he experienced from the use made by 
the peasantry of their newly won liberty. “ One would think 
that every rusty firelock in all Provence was at work in the 
indiscriminate destruction of all the birds. The wadding 
buzzed by my ears, or fell into my carriage, five or six times 
in the course of the day.” * * “ The declaration of the 

Assembly that every man is free to hunt on his own land 

fortunate, but not therefore less guilty—associates, have rescued by their 
pro tvess, it may be, a score of pecks of grain from being devoured by the 
voracious sparrow, but every one of the twelve thousand hatched and un¬ 
hatched birds, thus sacrificed to puerile vanity and ignorant prejudice, 
would have saved his bushel of wheat by preying upon insects that destroy 
the grain. Mr. Bedford, Mr. Heayman, and Mr. Stone ought to contribute 
the value of the bread they have wasted to the fund for the benefit of the 
Lancashire weavers; and it is to be hoped that the next Byron will satirize 
the sparrowcide as severely as the first did the prinoe of anglers, Walton, 
in the well known lines: 

“ The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb in his gullet 
Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.” 


92 EFFECT OF GAME LAWS—DESTRUCTION OF BIRDS. 

* * has filled all France with an intolerable cloud of sports¬ 
men. * * The declaration speaks of compensations and 

indemnities [to the seigneur s\ but the ungovernable populace 
takes advantage of the abolition of the game laws and laughs 
at the obligation imposed by the decree.” 

The French Revolution removed similar restrictions, with 
similar results, in other countries. The habits then formed 
have become hereditary on the Continent, and though game 
laws still exist in England, there is little doubt that the blind 
prejudices of the ignorant and half-educated classes in that 
country against birds are, in some degree, at least, due to a 
legislation, which, by restricting the chase of all game worth 
killing, drives the unprivileged sportsman to indemnify him¬ 
self by slaughtering all wild life which is not reserved for the 
amusement of his betters. Hence the lord of the manor buys 
his partridges and his hares by sacrificing the bread of his 
tenants, and so long as the farmers of Crawley are forbidden 
to follow higher game, they will suicidally revenge themselves 
by destroying the sparrows which protect their wdieatfields. 

On the Continent, and especially in Italy, the comparative 
scarcity and dearness of animal food combine with the feeling 
I have just mentioned to stimulate still further the destructive 
passions of the fowler. In the Tuscan province of Grosseto, 
containing less than 2,000 square miles, nearly 300,000 thrushes 
and other small birds are annually brought to market.* 

* Salvagnoli, Memorie mile Maremme Toscane , p. 143. The country 
about Naples is filled with slender towers fifteen or twenty feet high, which 
are a standing puzzle to strangers. They are the stations of the fowlers 
who watch from them the flocks of small birds and drive them down in 
to the nets by throwing stones over them. 

Tschudi has collected in his little work, TJeber die Landwirthschaftliche 
Bedeutung der Vogel , many interesting facts respecting the utility of birds, 
and the wanton destruction of them in Italy and elsewhere. Not only the 
owl, but many other birds more familiarly known as predacious in their 
habits, are useful by destroying great numbers of mice and moles. The 
importance of this last service becomes strikingly apparent when it is 
known that the burrows of the mole are among the most frequent causes 
of rupture in the dikes of the Po, and, consequently, of inundations which 


WEAKNESS OE BIRDS. 


93 


Birds are less hardy in constitution, they possess less facility 
of accommodation,* and they are more severely affected by 
climatic excess than quadrupeds. Besides, they generally want 
the means of shelter against the inclemency of the weather 
and against pursuit by their enemies, which holes and dens 
afford to burrowing animals and to some larger beasts of prey. 
The egg is exposed to many dangers before hatching, and the 
young bird is especially tender, defenceless, and helpless. 
Every cold rain, every violent wind, every hailstorm during 
the breeding season, destroys hundreds of nestlings, and the 
parent often perishes with her progeny while brooding over it 
in the vain effort to protect it.f The great proportional num¬ 
bers of birds, their migratory habits, and the ease with which 
they may escape most dangers that beset them, would seem to 
secure them from extirpation, and even from very great nu¬ 
merical reduction. But experience shows that when not pro- 

lay many square miles under water .—Annales des Fonts et Chaussees , 1847, 
Ire s6mestre, p. 150. 

* Wild birds are very tenacious in their habits. The extension of par¬ 
ticular branches of agriculture introduces new birds ; but unless in the case 
of such changes in physical conditions, particular species seem indissolubly 
attached to particular localities. The migrating tribes follow almost un- 
deviatingly the same precise line of flight in their annual journeys, and 
establish themselves in the same breeding places from year to year. The 
stork is a strong-winged bird and roves far for food, but very rarely estab¬ 
lishes new colonies. He is common in Holland, but unknown in England. 
Hot above five or six pairs of storks commonly breed in the suburbs of 
Constantinople along the European shore of the narrow Bosphorus, while 
—much to the satisfaction of the Moslems, who are justly proud of the 
marked partiality of so orthodox a bird—dozens of chimneys of the true 
believers on the Asiatic side are crowned with his nests. 

t It is not the unfledged and the nursing bird alone that are exposed 
to destruction by severe weather. Whole flocks of adult and strong- 
winged tribes are killed by hail. Severe winters are usually followed by 
a sensible diminution in the numbers of the non-migrating birds, and a 
cold storm in summer often proves fatal to the more delicate species. On 
the 10th of June, 184-, five or six inches of snow fell in Northern Vermont. 
The next morning I found a humming bird killed by the cold, and hanging 
by its claws just below a loose clapboard on the wall of a small wooden 
building where it had sought shelter. 


94 


DESTRUCTION OF BIRDS. 


tected by law, by popular favor or superstition, or by other 
special circumstances, tliey yield very readily to the hostile 
influences of civilization, and, though the first operations of the 
settler are favorable to the increase of many species, the great 
extension of rural and of mechanical industry is, in a variety 
of ways, destructive even to tribes not directly warred upon 
by man.* 

* Lyell, Antiquity of Man, p. 409, observes : “Of birds it is estimated 
that tbe number of those which die every year equals the aggregate num¬ 
ber by which the species to which they respectively belong is, on the 
average, permanently represented.” 

A remarkable instance of the influence of new circumstances upon birds 
was observed upon the establishment of a lighthouse on Cape Cod some 
years since. The morning after the lamps were lighted for the first time, 
more than a hundred dead birds of several different species, chiefly water 
fowl, were found at the foot of the tower. They had been killed in the 
course of the night by flying against the thick glass or grating of the 
lantern. 

Migrating birds, whether for greater security from eagles, hawks, and 
other enemies, or for some unknown reason, perform a great part of their 
annual journeys by night; and it is observed in the Alps that they follow 
the high roads in their passage across the mountains. This is partly 
because the food in search of which they must sometimes descend is prin¬ 
cipally found near the roads, it is, however, not altogether for the sake 
of consorting with man, or of profiting by his labors, that their line of flight 
conforms to the paths he has traced, but rather because the great roads are 
carried through the natural depressions in the chain, and hence the birds 
can cross the summit by these routes without rising to a height where at 
the seasons of migration the cold would be excessive. 

The instinct which guides migratory birds in their course is not in all 
cases infallible, and it seems to be confounded by changes in the condition 
of the surface. I am familiar with a village in Mew England, at the junc¬ 
tion of two valleys, each drained by a mill stream, where the flocks of wild 
geese which formerly passed, every spring and autumn, were very frequently 
lost, as it was popularly phrased, and I have often heard their screams in 
the night as they flew wildly about in perplexity as to the proper course. 
Perhaps the village lights embarrassed them, or perhaps the constant 
changes in the face of the country, from the clearings then going on, 
introduced into the landscape features not according with tho ideal map 
handed down in the anserine family, and thus deranged its traditional 
geography. 


EXTIRPATION OF BIRDS. 


95 


Nature sets bounds to the disproportionate increase of 
birds, while at the same time, by the multitude of their re¬ 
sources, she secures them from extinction through her owm 
spontaneous agencies. Man both preys upon them and wan¬ 
tonly destroys them. The delicious flavor of game birds, and 
the skill implied in the various arts of the sportsman who 
devotes himself to fowling, make them favorite objects of the 
chase, while the beauty of their plumage, as a military and 
feminine decoration, threatens to involve the sacrifice of the 
last survivor of many once numerous species. Thus far, but 
few birds described by ancient or modern naturalists are 
known to have become absolutely extinct, though there are 
some cases in which they are ascertained to have utterly disap¬ 
peared from the face of the earth in very recent times. The 
most familiar instances are those of the dodo, a large bird 
peculiar to the Mauritius or Isle of France, exterminated about 
the year 1690, and now known only by two or three fragments 
of skeletons, and the solitary, which inhabited the islands of 
Bourbon and Bodriguez, but has not been seen for more than 
a century. A parrot and some other birds of the Norfolk 
Island group are said to have lately become extinct. The 
wingless auk, Alca impennis , a bird remarkable for its exces¬ 
sive fatness, was very abundant two or three hundred years 
ago in the Faroe Islands, and on the whole Scandinavian sea¬ 
board. The early voyagers found either the same or a closely 
allied species, in immense numbers, on all the coasts and isl¬ 
ands of Newfoundland. The value of its flesh and its oil made 
it one of the most important resources of the inhabitants of 
those sterile regions, and it was naturally an object of keen 
pursuit. It is supposed to be now completely extinct, and few 
museums can show even its skeleton. 

There seems to be strong reason to believe that our boasted 
modern civilization is guiltless of one or two sins of extermina¬ 
tion which have been committed in recent ages. New Zea¬ 
land formerly possessed three species of dinornis, one of 
which, called moa by the islanders, was much larger than the 
ostrich. The condition in which the bones of these birds have 


96 


DESTRUCTION OF BIRDS. 


been found and the traditions of the natives concur to prove 
that, though the aborigines had probably extirpated them 
before the discovery of New Zealand by the whites, they still 
existed at a comparatively late period. The same remarks 
apply to a winged giant the eggs of which have been brought 
from Madagascar. This bird must have much exceeded the 
dimensions of the moa, at least so far as we can judge from the 
egg, which is eight times as large as the average size of the 
ostrich egg, or about one hundred and fifty times that of 
the hen. 

But though we have no evidence that man has extermi¬ 
nated many species of birds, we know that his persecutions 
have caused their disappearance from many localities where 
they once were common, and greatly diminished their num¬ 
bers in others. The cappercailzie, Tctrao urogallus , the finest 
of the grouse family, formerly abundant in Scotland, had 
become extinct in Great Britain, but has been reintroduced 
from Sweden.* The ostrich is mentioned' by all the old trav- 

* The cappercailzie, or tjader, as he is called in Sweden, is a bird of 
singular habits, and seems to want some of the protective instincts which 
secure most other wild birds from destruction. The younger Lsestadius 
frequently notices the tjader, in his very remarkable account of the Swe¬ 
dish Laplanders—a work wholly unsurpassed as a genial picture of semi¬ 
barbarian life, and not inferior in minuteness of detail to Schlatter’s 
description of the manners of the Nogai Tartars, or even to Lane’s admi¬ 
rable and exhaustive work on the Modern Egyptians. The tjader, though 
not a bird of passage, is migratory, or rather wandering in domicile, and 
appears to undertake very purposeless and absurd journeys. “When he 
flits,” says Lsestadius, “he follows a straight course, and sometimes pursues 
it quite out of the country. It is said that, in foggy weather, he sometimes 
flies out to sea, and, when tired, falls into the water and is drowned. It is 
accordingly observed that, when he flies westwardly, toward the moun¬ 
tains, he soon comes back again; but when he takes an eastwardly course, 
he returns no more, and for a long time is very scarce in Lapland. From 
this it would seem that he turns back from the bald mountains, when he 
discovers that he has strayed from his proper home, the wood ; but when 
he finds himself over the Baltic, where he cannot alight to rest and collect 

himself, he flies on until he is exhausted and falls into the sea.”_ Petrus 

L^estadius, Journal af forsta aret , etc., p. 325. 


VALUE OF BI11DS. 


97 


ellers, as common on the Isthmus of Suez down to the middle 
of the seventeenth century. It appears to have frequented 
Syria and even Asia Minor at earlier periods, hut is now found 
only in the seclusion of remoter deserts. 

The modern increased facilities of transportation have 
brought distant markets within reach of the professional hunt¬ 
er, and thereby given a new impulse to his destructive pro¬ 
pensities. Hot only do all Great Britain and Ireland contrib¬ 
ute to the supply of game for the British capital, but the 
canvas-back duck of the Potomac, and even the prairie hen 
from the basin of the Mississippi, may be found at the stalls 
of the London poulterer. Kohl * informs us that on the coasts 
of the North Sea, twenty thousand wild ducks are usually 
taken in the course of the season in a single decoy, and sent to 
the large maritime towns for sale. The statistics of the great 
European cities show a prodigious consumption of game birds, 
but the official returns fall far below the truth, because they 
do not include the rural districts, and because neither the 
poacher nor his customers report the number of his victims. 
Reproduction, in cultivated countries, cannot keep pace with 
this excessive destruction, and there is no doubt that all the 
wild birds which are chased for their flesh or their plumage 
are diminishing with a rapidity which justifies the fear that 
the last of them will soon follow the dodo and the wingless 
auk. 

Fortunately the larger birds which are pursued for their 
flesh or for their feathers, and those the eggs of which are used 
as food, are, so far as we know the functions appointed to them 
by nature, not otherwise specially useful to man, and, there¬ 
fore, their wholesale destruction is an economical evil only in 
the same sense in which all waste of productive capital is an 
evil. If it were possible to confine the consumption of game 
fowl to a number equal to the annual increase, the world 
would be a gainer, but not to the same extent as it would be 
by checking the wanton sacrifice of millions of the smaller 

* Die HerzogtMmer Schleswig und Holstein , i, p. 203. 

7 


98 


INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 


birds, which are of no real value as food, but which, as we 
have seen, render a most important service by battling, in our 
behalf, as well as in their own, against the countless legions of 
humming and of creeping things, with wdiich the prolific pow¬ 
ers of insect life would otherwise cover the earth. 


Introduction of Birds. 

Man has undesignedly introduced into new districts per¬ 
haps fewer species of birds than of quadrupeds ; but the distri¬ 
bution of birds is very much influenced by the character of his 
industry, and the transplantation of every object of agricul¬ 
tural production is, at a longer or shorter interval, followed by 
that of the birds which feed upon its seeds, or more frequently 
upon the insects it harbors. The vulture, the crow, and other 
winged scavengers, follow the march of armies as regularly as 
the wolf. Birds accompany ships on long voyages, for the 
sake of the offal which is thrown overboard, and, in such cases, 
it might often happen that they would breed and become nat¬ 
uralized in countries where they had been unknown before.* 
There is a familiar story of an English bird which built its nest 
in an unused block in the rigging of a ship, and made one or 
two short voyages with the vessel while hatching its eggs. 
Had the young become fledged while lying in a foreign har¬ 
bor, they would of course have claimed the rights of citizen¬ 
ship in the country where they first took to the wing.f 

* Gulls hover about ships in port, and often far out at sea, diligently 
watching for the waste of the caboose. While the four great fleets, 
English, French, Turkish, and Egyptian, were lying in the Bosphorus, in 
the summer and autumn of 1853, a young lady of my family called my 
attention to the fact that the gulls were far more numerous about the ships 
of one of the fleets than about the others. This was verified by repeated 
observation, and the difference was owing no doubt to the greater abun¬ 
dance of the refuse from the cookrooms of the naval squadron most 
frequented by the birds. Persons acquainted with the economy of the 
navies of the states in question, will be able to conjecture which fleet was 
most favored with these delicate attentions. 

t Birds do not often voluntarily take passage on board ships bound for 


UTILITY OF INSECTS AND WORMS. 


99 


Some enthusiastic entomologist will, perhaps, by and by 
discover that insects and worms are as essential as the larger 
organisms to the proper working of the great terraqueous 
machine, and we shall have as eloquent pleas in defence of 
the mosquito, and perhaps even of the tzetze fly, as Toussenel 
and Michelet have framed in behalf of the bird.* The silk¬ 
worm and the bee need no apologist; a gallnut produced by 
the puncture of an insect on a Syrian oak is a necessary ingre¬ 
dient in the ink I am writing with, and from my windows I 
recognize the grain of the kermes and the cochineal in the gay 
habiliments of the holiday groups beneath them. But agricul¬ 
ture, too, is indebted to the insect and the worm. The an¬ 
cients, according to Pliny, were accustomed to hang branches 

foreign countries, but I can testify to one such case. A stork, which had 
nested near one of the palaces on the Bosphorus, had, by some accident, 
injured a wing, and was unable to join his fellows when they commenced 
their winter migration to the banks of the Nile. Before he was able to fly 
again, he was caught, and the flag of the nation to which the palace 
belonged was tied to his leg, so that he was easily identified at a consid¬ 
erable distance. As his wing grew stronger, he made several unsatis¬ 
factory experiments at flight, and at last, by a vigorous effort, succeeded 
in reaching a passing ship bound southward, and perched himself on a 
topsail yard. I happened to witness this movement, and observed him 
quietly maintaining his position as long as I could discern him with a spy¬ 
glass. I suppose he finished the voyage, for he certainly did not return to 
the palace. 

* The enthusiasm of naturalists is not always proportioned to the mag¬ 
nitude or importance of the organisms they concern themselves with. It 
is not recorded that Adams, who found the colossal antediluvian pachy¬ 
derm in a thick-ribbed mountain of Siberian ice, ran wild over his trou¬ 
vaille ; but Schmidl, in describing the natural history of the caves of the 
Karst, speaks of an eminent entomologist as “ der gluckliche Entdecker ,” 
the happy discoverer of a new coleopteron, in one of those dim caverns. 
How various are the sources of happiness! Think of a learned German 
professor, the bare enumeration of whose Rath-ships and scientific Mitglied- 
ships fills a page, made famous in the annals of science, immortal, happy, 
by the discovery of a beetle! Had that imperial ennuye , who offered a 
premium for the invention of a new pleasure, but read SchmidTs Eohlen 
des Karstes , what splendid rewards would he not have heaped upon Kirby 
and Spence 1 


100 


UTILITY OF EARTHWORMS. 


of the wild fig upon the domestic tree, in order that the insects 
which frequented the former might hasten the ripening of the 
cultivated fig by their punctures—or, as others suppose, might 
fructify it by transporting to it the pollen of the wild fruit— 
and this process, called caprification, is not yet entirely obsolete. 
The earthworms long ago made good their title to the respect 
and gratitude of the farmer as well as ot the angler. The 
utility of the earthworms has been pointed out in many 
scientific as well as in many agricultural treatises. The fol¬ 
lowing extract, cut from a newspaper, will answer my present 
purpose: 

“ Mr. Josiah Parkes, the consulting engineer of the Royal 
Agricultural Society of England, says that worms are great 
assistants to the drainer, and valuable aids to the farmer in 
keeping up the fertility of the soil. lie says they love moist, 
but not wet soils ; they will bore down to, but not into water ; 
they multiply rapidly on land after drainage, and prefer a 
deeply dried soil. On examining with Mr. Thomas Ham¬ 
mond, of Penhurst, Kent, part of a field which he had deeply 
drained, after long-previous shallow drainage, he found that 
the worms had greatly increased in number, and that their 
bores descended quite to the level of the pipes. Many worm 
bores were large enough to receive the little finger. Mr. 
Henry Handley had informed him of a piece of land near the 
sea in Lincolnshire, over which the sea had broken and killed 
all the worms—the field remained sterile until the worms 
again inhabited it. He also showed him a piece of pasture 
land near to his house, in which worms were in such numbers 
that he thought their casts interfered too much with its pro¬ 
duce, which induced him to have it rolled at night in order to 
destroy the worms. The result w r as, that the fertility of the 
field greatly declined, nor was it restored until they had 
recruited their numbers, which was aided by collecting and 
transporting multitudes of worms from the fields. 

“ The great depth into which worms will bore, and from 
which they push up fine fertile soil, and cast it on the surface, 
has been admirably traced by Mr. C. Darwin, of Down, Kent, 


UTILITY OF EARTHWORMS. 


101 


who has shown that in a few years they have actually elevated 
the surface of fields by a large layer of rich mould, several inches 
thick—thus affording nourishment to the roots of grasses, and 
increasing the productiveness of the soil.” 

It should be added that the writer quoted, and others who 
have discussed the subject, have overlooked one very import¬ 
ant element in the fertilization produced by earthworms. I 
refer to the enrichment of the soil by their excreta during life, 
and by the decomposition of their remains when they die. 
The manure thus furnished is as valuable as the like amount 
of similar animal products derived from higher organisms, and 
when we consider the prodigious numbers of these worms 
found on a .single square yard of some soils, we may easily see 
that they furnish no insignificant contribution to the nutritive 
material required for the growth of plants.* 

The perforations of the earthworm mechanically affect the 
texture of the soil and its permeability by water, and they 
therefore have a certain influence on the form and character 
of surface. But the geographical importance of insects proper, 
as well as of worms, depends principally on their connection 

* I believe there is no foundation for the supposition that earthworms 
attack the tuber of the potato. Some of them, especially one or two spe¬ 
cies employed by anglers as bait, if natives of the woods, are at least rare 
in shaded grounds, but multiply very rapidly after the soil is brought 
under cultivation. Forty or fifty years ago they were so scarce in the 
newer parts of New England, that the rustic fishermen of every village 
kept secret the few places where they were to be found in their neighbor¬ 
hood, as a professional mystery, but at present one can hardly turn over a 
shovelful of rich moist soil anywhere, without unearthing several of them. 
A very intelligent lady, born in the woods of Northern New England, told 
me that, in her childhood, these worms were almost unknown in that 
region, though anxiously sought for by the anglers, but that they increased 
as the country was cleared, and at last became so numerous in some places, 
that the water of springs, and even of shallow wells, which had formerly 
been excellent, was rendered undrinkable by the quantity of dead worms 
that fell into them. The increase of the robin and other small birds which 
follow the settler when he has prepared a suitable home for them, at last 
checked the excessive multiplication of the worms, and abated the nui¬ 


sance. 


102 


INFLUENCE OF INSECTS ON VEGETATION. 


with vegetable life as agents of its fecundation, and of its 
destruction.* I am acquainted with no single fact so strik¬ 
ingly illustrative of this importance, as the following statement 
which I take from a notice of Darwin’s volume, On Various 
Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertil¬ 
ized by Insects, in the Saturday Review, of October 18, 1862 : 
“ The net result is, that some six thousand species of orchids 
are absolutely dependent upon the agency of insects for their 
fertilization. That is to say, were those plants unvisited by 
insects, they would all rapidly disappear.” What is true of 
the orchids is more or less true of many other vegetable fam¬ 
ilies. We do not know the limits of this agency, and many 
of the insects habitually regarded as unqualified pests, may 
directly or indirectly perform functions as important to the 
most valuable plants as the services rendered by certain tribes 
to the orchids. I say directly or indirectly, because, besides 
the other arrangements of nature for checking the undue mul¬ 
tiplication of particular species, she has established a police 
among insects themselves, by which some of them keep down 
or promote the increase of others ; for there are insects, as 
well as birds and beasts, of prey. The existence of an insect 

which fertilizes a useful vegetable may depend on that of 

\ 

* I have already remarked that the remains of extant animals are 
rarely, if ever, gathered in sufficient quantities to possess any geographical 
importance by their mere mass; but the decayed exuviae of even the 
smaller and humbler forms of life are sometimes abundant enough to 
exercise a perceptible influence on soil and atmosphere. “ The plain of 
Cumana,” says Humboldt, “ presents a remarkable phenomenon, after 
heavy rains. The moistened earth, when heated by the rays of the sun, 
diffuses the musky odor common in the torrid zone to animals of very 
different classes, to the jaguar, the small species of tiger cat, the cabiai, 
the gallinazo vulture, the crocodile, the viper, and the rattlesnake. The 
gaseous emanations, the vehicles of this aroma, appear to be disengaged in 
proportion as the soil, which contains the remains of an innumerable mul¬ 
titude of reptiles, worms, and insects, begins to be impregnated with 
water. Wherever we stir the earth, we are struck with the mass of 
organic substances which in turn are developed and become transformed 
or decomposed. Nature in these climes seems more active, more prolific, 
and so to speak, more prodigal of life.” 


BALANCE OF ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE LIFE. 103 

another, which constitutes his food in some stage of his life, 
and this other again may be as injurious to some plant as his 
destroyer is beneficial to another. The equation of animal and 
vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intel¬ 
ligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of 
disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we 
throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life. 

This much, however, we seem authorized to conclude: as 
often as we destroy the balance by deranging the original pro¬ 
portions between different orders of spontaneous life, the law 
of self-preservation requires us to restore the equilibrium, by 
either directly returning the weight abstracted from one scale, 
or removing a corresponding quantity from the other. In 
other words, destruction must be either repaired by repro¬ 
duction, or compensated by new destruction in an opposite 
quarter. 

The parlor aquarium has taught even those to whom it is 
but an amusing toy, that the balance of animal and vegetable 
life must be preserved, and that the excess of either is fatal to 
the other, in the artificial tank as well as in natural waters. 
A few years ago, the water of the Cochituate aqueduct at 
Boston became so offensive in smell and taste as to be quite 
unfit for use. Scientific investigation found the cause in the 
too scrupulous care with which aquatic vegetation had been 
excluded from the reservoir, and the consequent death and 
decay of the animalcule which could not be shut out, nor live 
in the water without the vegetable element.* 

* It is remarkable that Palissy, to whose great merits as an acute 
observer I am happy to have frequent occasion to bear testimony, had 
noticed that vegetation was necessary to maintain the purity of water in 
artificial reservoirs, though he mistook the rationale of its influence, which 
he ascribed to the elemental “ salt ” supposed by him to play an important 
part in all the operations of nature. In his treatise upon Waters and 
Fountains, p. 174, of the reprint of 1844, he says: “And in special, thou 
shalt note one point, the which is understood of few: that is to say, that 
the leaves of the trees which fall upon the parterre, and the herbs growing 
beneath, and singularly the fruits, if any there be upon the trees, being 
decayed, the waters of the parterre shall draw unto them the salt of the 


104 


INSECTS NOXIOUS TO GIIAIN. 


Introduction of Insects. 

The general tendency of man’s encroachments upon spon¬ 
taneous nature has been to increase insect life at the expense 
of vegetation and of the smaller quadrupeds and birds. 
Doubtless there are insects in all woods, but in temperate 
climates they are comparatively few and harmless, and the 
most numerous tribes which breed in the forest, or rather 
in its waters, and indeed in all solitudes, are those which 
little injure vegetation, such as mosquitoes, gnats, and the 
like. With the cultivated plants of man come the myriad 
tribes which feed or breed upon them, and agriculture not 
only introduces new species, but so multiplies the number of 
individuals as to defy calculation. Newly introduced vegeta¬ 
bles frequently escape for years the insect plagues which had 
infested them in their native habitat; but the importation of 
other varieties of the plant, the exchange of seed, or some 
mere accident, is sure in the long run to carry the egg, the 
larva, or the chrysalis to the most distant shores where the 
plant assigned to it by nature as its possession has preceded it. 
For many years after the colonization of the United States, 
few or none of the insects which attack wheat in its different 
stages of growth, were known in America. During the Revo¬ 
lutionary war, the Hessian fly, Cecidomyia destructor , made its 
appearance, and it was so called because it was first observed 
in the year when the Hessian troops were brought over, and 
was popularly supposed to have been accidentally imported 
by those unwelcome strangers. Other destroyers of cereal 
grains have since found their way across the Atlantic, and a 
noxious European aphis has first attacked the American wheat- 
fields within the last four or five years. Unhappily, in these 
cases of migration, the natural corrective of excessive multipli¬ 
cation, the parasitic or voracious enemy of the noxious insect, 
does not always accompany the wanderings of its prey, and 

said fruits, leaves, and herbs, the which shall greatly better the water of 
thy fountains, and hinder the putrefaction thereof.” 


INTRODUCTION OF INSECTS. 


105 


the bane long precedes the antidote. Hence, in the United 
States, the ravages of imported insects injurious to cultivated 
crops, not being checked by the counteracting influences which 
nature had provided to limit their devastations in the Old 
"World, are much more destructive than in Europe. It is not 
known that the wheat midge is preyed upon in America by 
any other insect, and in seasons favorable to it, it multiplies to 
a degree which would prove almost fatal to the entire harvest, 
were it not that, in the great territorial extent of the United 
States, there is room for such differences of soil and climate as, 
in a given year, to present in one State all the conditions favor¬ 
able to the increase of a particular insect, while in another, the 
natural influences are hostile to it. The only apparent remedy 
for this evil is, to balance the disproportionate development of 
noxious foreign species by bringing from their native country 
the tribes which prey upon them. This, it seems, has been 
attempted. The United States’ Census Report for 1860, p. 
82, states that the Hew York Agricultural Society “ has intro¬ 
duced into this country from abroad certain parasites which 
Providence has created to counteract the destructive powers 
of some of these depredators.” 

This is, however, not the only purpose for which man has 
designedly introduced foreign forms of insect life. The eggs 
of the silkworm are known to have been brought from the 
farther East to Europe in the sixth century, and new silk spin¬ 
ners which feed on the castor oil bean and the aiiantlius, have 
recently been reared in France and in South America with 
promising success. The cochineal, long regularly bred in 
aboriginal America, has been transplanted to Spain, and both 
the kerrnes insect and the cantliarides have been transferred to 
other climates than their own. The honey bee must be ranked 
next to the silkworm in economical importance.* This useful 

* Between the years 1851 and 1858, both inclusive, the United States 
exported 2,665,857 pounds of beeswax, besides a considerable quantity 
employed in the manufacture of candles for exportation. This is an aver¬ 
age of more than 830,000 pounds per year. The census of 1850 gave tho 
total production of wax and honey for that year at 14,853,128 pounds. In 


106 


INTRODUCTION OF INSECTS. 


creature was carried to the United States by European col¬ 
onists, in the latter part of the seventeenth century ; it did not 
cross the Mississippi till the close of the eighteenth, and it is 
only within the last five or six years that it has been trans¬ 
ported to California, where it was previously unknown. The 
Italian stingless bee has very lately been introduced into the 
United States. 

The insects and worms intentionally transplanted by man 
bear but a small proportion to those accidentally introduced 
by him. Plants and animals often carry their parasites with 
them, and the traffic of commercial countries, which exchange 
their products with every zone and every stage of social exist¬ 
ence, cannot fail to transfer in both directions the minute 
organisms that are, in one way or another, associated with 
almost every object important to the material interests of man.* 

The tenacity of life possessed by many insects, their pro¬ 
digious fecundity, the length of time they often remain in the 
different phases of their existence, f the security of the retreats 

1860, it amounted to 26,870,818 pounds, the increase being partly due to 
the introduction of improved races of bees from Italy and Switzerland.— 
Bigelow, Les Etats Unis en 1863, p. 376. 

* A few years ago, a laborer, employed at a North American port in 
discharging a cargo of hides from the opposite extremity of the continent, 
was fatally poisoned by the bite or the sting of an unknown insect, which 
ran out from a hide he was handling. 

t In many insects, some of the stages of life regularly continue for sev¬ 
eral years, and they may, under peculiar circumstances, be almost indefi¬ 
nitely prolonged. Dr. Dwight mentions the following remarkable case of 
this sort, which may he new to many readers: “ While I was here [at 
Williamstown, Mass.], Dr. Fitch showed me an insect, about an inch in 
length, of a browm color tinged with orange, with two antennas, not unlike 
a rosebug. This insect came out of a tea table, made of the boards of an 
apple tree.” Dr. Dwight examined the table, and found the “ cavity 
whence the insect had emerged into the light,” to be “ about two inches 
in length, nearly horizontal, and inclining upward very little, except at the 
mouth. Between the hole, and the outside of the leaf of the table, there 
were forty grains of the wood.” It was supposed that the sawyer and the 
cabinet maker must have removed at least thirteen grains more, and the 
table had been in the possession of its proprietor for twenty years. 


INTRODUCTION OF INSECTS. 


107 


into wliicli their small dimensions enable them to retire, are 
all circumstances very favorable not only to the perpetuity of 
their species, but to their transportation to distant climates 
and their multiplication in their new homes. The teredo, so 
destructive to shipping, has been carried by the vessels whose 
wooden walls it mines to almost every part of the globe. The 
termite, or white ant, is said to have been brought to Rochefort 
by the commerce of that port a hundred years ago.* This 
creature is more injurious to wooden structures and imple¬ 
ments than any other known insect. It eats out almost the 
entire substance of the wood, leaving only thin partitions 
between the galleries it excavates in it; but as it never gnaws 
through the surface to the air, a stick of timber may be almost 
wholly consumed without showing any external sign of the 
damage it lias sustained. The termite is found also in other 
parts of France, and particularly at Rochelle, where, thus far, 
its ravages are confined to a single quarter of the city. A 
borer, of similar habits, is not uncommon in Italy, and you 
may see in that country, handsome chairs and other furniture 
which have been reduced by this insect to a framework of 
powder of post, covered, and apparently held together, by 
nothing but the varnish. 

The carnivorous, and often the herbivorous insects render 
an important service to man by consuming dead and decaying 
animal and vegetable matter, the decomposition of which 
would otherwise fill the air with effluvia noxious to health. 
Some of them, the grave-digger beetle, for instance, bury the 
small animals in which they lay their eggs, and thereby pre¬ 
vent the escape of the gases disengaged by putrefaction. The 
prodigious rapidity of development in insect life, the great 
numbers of the individuals in many species, and the voracity 
of most of them while in the larva state, justify the appella¬ 
tion of nature’s scavengers which has been bestowed upon 
them, and there is very little doubt that, in warm countries, 

* It does not appear to be quite settled whether the termites of France 
are indigenous or imported. See Quatkefages, Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste , 
ii, pp. 400, 542, 543. 


108 


INSECTS AS FOOD FOE FISH. 


they consume a much larger quantity of putrescent organic 
material than the quadrupeds and the birds which feed upon 
such aliment. 


Destruction of Insects. 

It is well known to naturalists, but less familiarly to com¬ 
mon observers, that the aquatic larvae of some insects consti¬ 
tute, at certain seasons, a large part of the food ot fresh-water 
fish, while other larvse, in their turn, prey upon the spawn 
and even the young of their persecutors.* The larvse of the 
mosquito and the gnat are the favorite food of the trout in the 
wooded regions where those insects abound.f Earlier in the 
year the trout feeds on the larvse of the May fly, which is 
itself very destructive to the spawn of the salmon, and hence, 
by a sort of house-that-Jack-built, the destruction of the mos- 

* I have seen the larva of the dragon fly in an aquarium, bite off the 
head of a young fish as long as itself. 

t Insects and fish—which prey upon and feed each other—are the only 
forms of animal life that are numerous in the native woods, and their 
range is, of course, limited by the extent of the waters. The great abun¬ 
dance of the trout, and of other more or less allied genera in the lakes of 
Lapland, seems to be due to the supply of food provided for them by ihe 
swarms of insects which in the larva state inhabit the waters, or, in other 
stages of their life, are accidentally swept into them. All travellers in the 
north of Europe speak of the gnat and the mosquito as very serious draw¬ 
backs upon the enjoyments of the summer tourist, who visits the head of 
the Gulf of Bothnia to see the midnight sun, and the brothers Lacstadius 
regard them as one of the great plagues of sub-Arctic life. “ The persecu¬ 
tions of these insects,” says Lars Levi Lsestadius \Gulex pipiens, Culex rep- 
tans, and Culex pulicaris ], “ leave not a moment’s peace, by day or night, 
to any living creature. Not only man, but cattle, and even birds and wild 
beasts, suffer intolerably from their bite.” He adds in a note, “ I will not 
affirm that they have ever devoured a living man, but many young cattle, 
such as lambs and calves, have been worried out of their lives by them. 
All the people of Lapland declare that young birds are killed by them, and 
this is not improbable, for birds are scarce after seasons when the midge, 
the gnat, and the mosquito are numerous.”— Om Uppodlingar i Lappmar- 
ken , p. 50. 

Petrus Lsostadius makes similar statements in his Journal for forsta 
drct , p. 285. 


INSECT DESTROYERS-WOODPECKERS. 


109 


quito, that feeds the trout that preys on the May fly that 
destroys the eggs that hatch the salmon that pampers the epi¬ 
cure, may occasion a scarcity of this latter fish in waters where 
he would otherwise be abundant. Thus all nature is linked 
together by invisible bonds, and every organic creature, how¬ 
ever low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary to 
the well-being of some other among the myriad forms of life 
with which the Creator has peopled the earth. 

I have said that man has promoted the increase of the 
insect and the worm, by destroying the bird and the fish 
which feed upon them. Many insects, in the four different 
stages of their growth, inhabit in succession the earth, the 
water, and the air. In each of these elements they have their 
special enemies, and, deep and dark as are the minute recesses 
in which they hide themselves, they are pursued to the re¬ 
motest, obscurest corners by the executioners that nature has 
appointed to punish their delinquencies, and furnished with 
cunning contrivances for ferreting out the offenders and drag¬ 
ging them into the light of day. One tribe of birds, the wood¬ 
peckers, seems to depend for subsistence almost wholly on 
those insects which breed in dead or dying trees, and it is, 
perhaps, needless to say that the injury these birds do the 
forest is imaginary. They do not cut holes in the trunk of the 
tree to prepare a lodgment for a future colony of boring larvae, 
but to extract the worm which has already begun his mining 
labors. Hence these birds are not found where the forester 
removes trees as fast as they become fit habitations for such 
insects. In clearing new lands in the United States, dead 
trees, especially of the spike-leaved kinds, too much decayed 
to serve for timber, and which, in that state, are worth little 
for fuel, are often allowed to stand until they fall of them¬ 
selves. Such stubs, as they are popularly called, are filled 
with borers, and often deeply cut by the woodpeckers, whose 
strong bills enable them to penetrate to the very heart of the 
tree and drag out the lurking larvse. After a few years, the 
stubs fall, or, as wood becomes valuable, are cut and carried 
off for firewood, and, at the same time, the farmer selects for 


110 


INSECT DESTROYE11S—REPTILES. 


felling, in the forest he has reserved as a permanent source of 
supply of fuel and timber, the decaying trees which, like the 
dead stems in the fields, serve as a home for both the worm 
and his pursuer. We thus gradually extirpate this tribe of 
insects, and, with them, the species of birds which subsist prin¬ 
cipally upon them. Thus the fine, large, red-headed wood¬ 
pecker, Pious erytlirocejphalus , formerly very common in New 
England, has almost entirely disappeared from those States, 
since the dead trees are gone, and the apples, his favorite vege¬ 
table food, are less abundant. 

There are even large quadrupeds which feed almost exclu¬ 
sively upon insects. The ant bear is strong enough to pull 
down the clay houses built by the species of termites that 
constitute his ordinary diet, and the curious ai-ai, a climbing 
quadruped of Madagascar—of which I believe only a single 
specimen, secured by Mr. Sandwith, has yet reached Europe— 
is provided with a very slender, hook-nailed finger, long enough 
to reach far into a hole in the trunk of a tree, and extract the 
worm which bored it. 

Reptiles. 

But perhaps the most formidable foes of the insect, and 
even of the small rodents, are the reptiles. The chameleon 
approaches the insect perched upon the twig of a tree, with an 
almost imperceptible slowness of motion, until, at the distance 
of a foot, he shoots out his long, slimy tongue, and rarely fails 
to secure the victim. Even the slow toad catches the swift 
and wary housefly in the same manner; and in the warm 
countries of Europe, the numerous lizards contribute very 
essentially to the reduction of the insect population, which 
they both surprise in the winged state upon walls and trees, 
and consume as egg, worm, and chrysalis, in their earlier meta¬ 
morphoses. The serpents feed much upon insects, as well as 
upon mice, moles, and small reptiles, including also other 
snakes. The disgust and fear with which the serpent is so 
universally regarded expose him to constant persecution by 
man, and perhaps no other animal is so relentlessly sacrificed 


EXTIRPATION OF SERPENTS. 


Ill 


by him. In temperate climates, snakes are consumed by 
scarcely any beast or bird of prey except the stork, and they 
have few dangerous enemies but man, though in the tropics 
other animals prey upon them.* It is doubtful whether any 
species of serpent has been exterminated within the human 
period, and even the dense population of China has not been 
able completely to rid itself of the viper. They have, however, 
almost entirely disappeared from particular localities. The 
rattlesnake is now wholly unknown in many large districts 
where it was extremely common half a century ago, and Pal¬ 
estine has long been, if not absolutely free from venomous 
serpents, at least very nearly so.f 

Destruction of Fish. 

The inhabitants of the waters seem comparatively secure 
from human pursuit or interference by the inaccessibility of 
their retreats, and by our ignorance of their habits—a natural 

* It is very questionable whether there is any foundation for the pop¬ 
ular belief in the hostility of swine and of deer to the rattlesnake, and 
careful experiments as to the former quadruped seem to show that the sup¬ 
posed enmity is wholly imaginary. Observing that the starlings, stornelli , 
which bred in an old tower in Piedmont, carried something from their 
nests and dropped it upon the ground, about as often as they brought food 
to their young, I watched their proceedings, and found every day lying 
near the tower numbers of dead or dying slowworms, and, in a few cases, 
small lizards, which had, in every instance, lost about two inches of the 
tail. This part I believe the starlings gave to their nestlings, and threw 
away the remainder. 

f Kussell denies the existence of poisonous snakes in Northern Syria, 
and states that the last instance of death known to have occurred from the 
bite of a serpent near Aleppo took place a hundred years before his time. 
In Palestine, the climate, the thinness of population, the multitude of 
insects and of lizards, all circumstances, in fact, seem very favorable to the 
multiplication of serpents, but the venomous species, at least, are extremely 
rare, if at all known, in that country. I have, however, been assured by 
persons very familiar with Mount Lebanon, that cases of poisoning from 
the bite of snakes had occurred within a few years, near Hasbeiyeh, and at 
other places on the southern declivities of Lebanon and Hermon. In 


112 


WHALE FISHERY. 


result of the difficulty of observing the ways of creatures living 
in a medium in which we cannot exist. Human agency has, 
nevertheless, both directly and incidentally, produced great 
changes in the population of the sea, the lakes, and the rivers, 
and if the effects of such revolutions in aquatic life are appar¬ 
ently of small importance in general geography, they are still 
not wholly inappreciable. The great diminution in the abun¬ 
dance of the larger fish employed for food or pursued for prod¬ 
ucts useful in the arts is familiar, and when we consider how the 
vegetable and animal life on which they feed must be affected 
by the reduction of their numbers, it is easy to see that their 
destruction may involve considerable modifications in many 
of the material arrangements of nature. The whale does not 
appear to have been an object of pursuit by the ancients, for 
any purpose, nor do we know when the whale fishery first 
commenced.* It was, however, very actively prosecuted in 
the Middle Ages, and the Biscayans seem to have been partic¬ 
ularly successful in this as indeed in other branches of nautical 
industry, f Five hundred years ago, whales abounded in every 

Egypt, on the other hand, the cobra, the asp, and the cerastes are as 
numerous as ever, and are much dreaded by all the natives, except the 
professional snake charmers. 

* I use whale not in a technical sense, but as a generic term for all the 
large inhabitants of the sea popularly grouped under that name. 

t From the narrative of Ohther, introduced by King Alfred into his 
translation of Orosius, it is clear that the Northmen pursued the whale 
fishery in the ninth century, and it appears, both from the poem called 
The Whale, in the Codex Oxoniensis, and from the dialogue with the fish¬ 
erman in the Colloquies of Aelfric, that the Anglo-Saxons followed this 
dangerous chase at a period not much later. I am not aware of any evi¬ 
dence to show that any of the Latin nations engaged in this fishery until 
a century or two afterward, though it may not be easy to disprove their 
earlier participation in it. In mediaeval literature, Latin and Eomance, 
very frequent mention is made of a species of vessel called in Latin, hale - 
neria , balenerium , balenerius , balaneria , etc.; in Catalan, balener; in French, 
balenier ; all of which words occur in many other forms. The most obvious 
etymology of these words would suggest the meaning, whaler , baleinier; 
but some have supposed that the name was descriptive of the great size 
of the ships, and others have referred it to a different root. From the 


FOOD OF THE WHALE. 


113 


sea. They long since became so rare in the Mediterranean 
as not to afford encouragement for the fishery as a regular 
occupation ; and the great demand for oil and whalebone for 
mechanical and manufacturing purposes, in the present cen¬ 
tury, has stimulated the pursuit of the “ hugest of living crea¬ 
tures ” to such activity, that he has now almost wholly disap¬ 
peared from many favorite fishing grounds, and in others is 
greatly diminished in numbers. 

What special functions, besides his uses to man, are as¬ 
signed to the whale in the economy of nature, we do not 
know ; but some considerations, suggested by the character of 
the food upon which certain species subsist, deserve to be 
specially noticed. None of the great mammals grouped under 
the general name of whale are rapacious. They all live upon 
small organisms, and the most numerous species feed almost 
wholly upon the soft gelatinous mollusks in which the sea 
abounds in all latitudes. We cannot calculate even approxi¬ 
mately the number of the whales, or the quantity of organic 
nutriment consumed by an individual, and of course we can 
form no estimate of the total amount of animal matter with¬ 
drawn by them, in a given period, from the waters of the sea. 
It is certain, however, that it must have been enormous when 
they were more abundant, and that it is still very considerable. 
A very few years since, the United States had more than six 
hundred whaling ships constantly employed in the Pacific, 
and the product of the American whale fishery for the year 
ending June 1st, 1860, was seven millions and a half of dol¬ 
lars.* The mere bulk of the whales destroyed in a single year 

fourteenth century, the word occurs oftener, perhaps, in old Catalan, than 
in any other language; but Capmauy does not notice the whale fishery as 
one of the maritime pursuits of the very enterprising Catalan people, nor 
do I find any of the products of the whale mentioned in the old Catalan 
tariffs. The whalebone of the mediaeval writers, which is described as very 
white, is doubtless the ivory of the walrus or of the narwhale. 

* In consequence of the great scarcity of the whale, the use of coal gas 
for illumination, the substitution of other fatty and oleaginous substances, 
such as lard, palm oil, and petroleum, for right-whale oil and spermaceti, 
the whale fishery has rapidly fallen off within a few years. The great 

8 


114 


PIIOSFHORESCENCE OF THE SEA. 


by the American and the European vessels engaged in this 
fishery would form an island of no inconsiderable dimensions, 
and each one of those taken must have consumed, in the 
course of his growth, many times his own weight of mollusks. 
The destruction of the whales must have been followed by a 
proportional increase of the organisms they feed upon, and if 
we had the means of comparing the statistics of these humble 
forms of life, for even so short a period as that between the 
years 1760 and 1860, we should find a difference sufficient 
possibly, to suggest an explanation of some phenomena at 
present unaccounted for. 

For instance, as I have observed in another work,* the 
phosphorescence of the sea was unknown to ancient writers, or 
at least scarcely noticed by them, and even Homer—who, 
blind as tradition makes him when he composed his epics, had 
seen, and marked, in earlier life, all that the glorious nature 
of the Mediterranean and its coasts discloses to unscientific 
observation—nowhere alludes to this most beautiful and strik¬ 
ing of maritime wonders. In the passage just referred to, I 
have endeavored to explain the silence of ancient writers with 
respect to this as well as other remarkable phenomena on psy¬ 
chological grounds; but is it not possible that, in modem times, 
the animalculse which produce it may have immensely multi¬ 
plied, from the destruction of their natural enemies by man, 
and hence that the gleam shot forth by their decomposition, or 
by their living processes, is both more frequent and more brill¬ 
iant than in the days of classic antiquity ? 

Although the whale does not prey upon smaller creatures 
resembling himself in form and habits, yet true fishes are 
extremely voracious, and almost every tribe devours unspar- 

supply of petroleum, which is much used for lubricating machinery as well 
as for numerous other purposes, has produced a more perceptible effect on 
the whale fishery than any other single circumstance. According to Bige¬ 
low, Les Mats TJnis en 1863, p. 346, the American whaling fleet was 
diminished by 29 in 1858, 57 in 1860, 94 in 1861, and 65 in 1862. The 
present number of American ships employed in that fishery is 353. 

* The Origin and History of the English Language, &c., pp. 423, 424. 


DESTRUCTION OF FISH. 


115 


ingly tlie feebler species, and even the spawn and young of its 
own. The enormous destruction of the pike, the trout family, 
and other ravenous fish, as well as of the fishing birds, the seal, 
and the otter, by man, would naturally have occasioned a great 
increase in the weaker and more defenceless fish on which they 
feed, had he not been as hostile to them also as to their perse¬ 
cutors. We have little evidence that any fish employed as 
human food has naturally multiplied in modern times, while 
all the more valuable tribes have been immensely reduced in 
numbers.* This reduction must have affected the more vora¬ 
cious species not used as food by man, and accordingly the 
shark, and other fish of similar habits, though not objects of 
systematic pursuit, are now comparatively rare in many waters 
where they formerly abounded. The result is, that man has 
greatly reduced the numbers of all larger marine animals, 
and consequently indirectly favored the multiplication of the 
smaller aquatic organisms which entered into their nutriment. 
This change in the relations of the organic and inorganic 
matter of the sea must have exercised an influence on the lat¬ 
ter. What that influence has been, we cannot say, still less 

* Among the unexpected results of human action, the destruction or 
multiplication of fish, as well as of other animals, is a not unfrequent oc¬ 
currence. I shall have occasion to mention on a following page the exter¬ 
mination of the fish in a Swedish river by a flood occasioned by the sudden 
discharge of the waters of a pond. Williams, in his History of Vermont , 
i, p. 149, quoted in Thompson’s Natural History of Vermont , p. 142, 
records a case of the increase of trout from an opposite cause. In a pond 
formed by damming a small stream to obtain water power for a sawmill, 
and covering one thousand acres of primitive forest, the increased supply 
of food brought within reach of the fish multiplied them to that degree, 
that, at the head of the pond, where, in the spring, they crowded together 
in the brook which supplied it, they were taken by the hands at pleasure, 
and swine caught them without difficulty. A single sweep of a small 
scoopnet would bring up half a bushel, carts were filled with them as fast 
as if picked up on dry land, and in the fishing season they were commonly 
sold at a shilling (eightpence halfpenny, or about seventeen cents) a bushel. 
The increase in the size of the trout was as remarkable as the multipli¬ 
cation of their numbers. 


116 


INTRODUCTION OF FOREIGN FISH. 


can we predict what it will be hereafter; but its action is not 
for that reason the less certain. 

Introduction and Breeding of Fish. 

The introduction and successful breeding of fish of foreign 
species appears to have been long practised in China and was 
not unknown to the Greeks and Homans. This art has been 
revived in modern times, but thus far without any important 
results, economical or physical, though there seems to be good 
reason to believe it may be employed with advantage on an 
extended scale. As in the case of plants, man has sometimes 
undesignedly introduced new species of aquatic animals into 
countries distant from their birthplace. The accidental escape 
of the Chinese goldfish from ponds where they were bred as a 
garden ornament, has peopled some European, and it is said 
American streams with this species. Canals of navigation and 
irrigation interchange the fish of lakes and rivers widely sepa¬ 
rated by natural barriers, as well as the plants which drop 
their seeds into the waters. The Erie Canal, as measured by 
its own channel, has a length of about three hundred and sixty 
miles, and it has ascending and descending locks in both direc¬ 
tions. By this route, the fresh-water fish of the Hudson and 
the Upper Lakes, and some of the indigenous vegetables of 
these respective basins, have intermixed, and the fauna and 
flora of the two regions have now more species common to 
both than before the canal was opened. Some accidental 
attraction not unfrequently induces fish to follow a vessel for 
days in succession, and they may thus be enticed into zones 
very distant from their native habitat. Several years ago, I 
was told at Constantinople, upon good authority, that a couple 
of fish, of a species wholly unknown to the natives, had just 
been taken in the Bosphorus. They were alleged to have fol¬ 
lowed an English ship from the Thames, and to have been fre¬ 
quently observed by the crew during the passage, but I was 
unable to learn their specific character. 

Many of the fish which pass the greater part of the year in 


NATURALIZATION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS—BEDS OF SHELLS. 117 

salt water spawn in fresh, and some fresli-water species, tlie 
common brook trout of New England for instance, which, 
under ordinary circumstances, never visit the sea, will, if trans¬ 
ferred to brooks emptying directly into the ocean, go down 
into the salt water after spawning time, and return again the 
next season. Sea fish, the smelt among others, are said to 
have been naturalized in fresh water, and some naturalists 
have argued from the character of the fish of Lake Baikal, and 
especially from the existence of the seal in that locality, that 
all its inhabitants were originally marine species, and have 
changed their habits with the gradual conversion of the 
saline waters of the lake—once, as is assumed, a maritime bay 
—into fresh.* The presence of the seal is hardly conclusive on 
this point, for it is sometimes seen in Lake Champlain at the 
distance of some hundreds of miles from even brackish water. 
One of these animals was killed on the ice in that lake in Feb¬ 
ruary, 1810, another in February, 1816,f and remains of the 
seal have been found at other times in the same waters. 

The remains of the higher orders of aquatic animals are 
generally so perishable that, even where most abundant, they 
do not appear to be now forming permanent deposits of any 
considerable magnitude ; but it is quite otherwise with shell 
fish, and, as we shall see hereafter, with many of the minute 
limeworkers of the sea. There are, on the southern coast of 
the United States, beds of shells so extensive that they were 
formerly supposed to have been naturally accumulated, and 
were appealed to as proofs of an elevation of the coast by geo¬ 
logical causes; but they are now ascertained to have been 
derived from oysters, consumed in the course of long ages by 

* Babinet, Etudes et Lectures , ii, pp. 108, 110. 

f Thompson, Natural History of Vermont , p. 38, and Appendix, p. 13. 
There is no reason to believe that the seal breeds in Lake Champlain, but 
the individual last taken there must have been some weeks, at least, in its 
waters. It was killed on the ice in the widest part of the lake, on the 23d 
of February, thirteen days after the surface was entirely frozen, except the 
usual small cracks, and a month or two after the ice closed at all points 
north of the place where the seal was found. 


118 


FISH BREEDING. 


the inhabitants of Indian towns. The planting of a bed of 
oysters in a new locality might, very probably, lead, in time, 
to the formation of a bank, which, in connection with other 
deposits, might perceptibly affect the line of a coast, or, by 
changing the course of marine currents, or the outlet of a 
river, produce geographical changes of no small importance. 
The transplantation of oysters to artificial ponds has long been 
common, and it appears to have recently succeeded well on a 
large scale in the open sea on the French coast. A great 
extension of this fishery is hoped for, and it is now proposed to 
introduce upon the same coast the American soft clam, which 
is so abundant in the tide-washed beach sands of Long Isand 
Sound as to form, an important article in the diet of the neigh¬ 
boring population. 

The intentional naturalization of foreign fish, as I have said, 
has not thus far yielded important fruits ; but though this par¬ 
ticular branch of what is called, not very happily, pisciculture , 
has not yet established its claims to the attention of the phys¬ 
ical geographer or the political economist, the artificial breed¬ 
ing of domestic fish has already produced very valuable results, 
and is apparently destined to occupy an extremely conspicuous 
place in the history of man’s efforts to compensate his prodigal 
waste of the gifts of nature. The restoration of the primitive 
abundance of salt and fresh water fish, is one of the greatest 
material benefits that, with our present physical resources, 
governments can hope to confer upon their subjects. The 
rivers, lakes, and seacoasts once restocked, and protected by 
law from exhaustion by taking fish at improper seasons, by 
destructive methods, and in extravagant quantities, would 
continue indefinitely to furnish a very large supply of most 
healthful food, which, unlike all domestic and agricultural 
products, would spontaneously renew itself and cost nothing 
but the taking. There are many sterile or wornout soils in 
Europe so situated that they might, at no very formidable 
cost, be converted into permanent lakes, which would serve not 
only as reservoirs to retain the water of winter rains and snow, 
and give it out in the dry season for irrigation, but as breed- 


EXTIRPATION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS. 


119 


ing ponds for fish, and would thus, without further cost, yield 
a larger supply of human food than can at present be obtained 
from them even at a great expenditure of capital and labor in 
agricultural operations. The additions which might be made 
to the nutriment of the civilized world by a judicious admin¬ 
istration of the resources of the waters, would allow some 
restriction of the amount of soil at present employed for agri¬ 
cultural purposes, and a corresponding extension of the area 
of the forest, and would thus facilitate a return to primitive 
geographical arrangements which it is important partially to 
restore. 

Extirpation of Aquatic Animals. 

It does not seem probable that man, with all his rapacity 
and all his enginery, will succeed in totally extirpating any 
salt-water fish, but he has already exterminated at least one 
marine warm-blooded animal—Steller’s sea cow—and the 
walrus, the sea lion, and other large amphibia, as well as the 
principal fishing quadrupeds, are in imminent danger of ex¬ 
tinction. Steller’s sea cow, Ehytina Stelleri , was first seen by 
Europeans in the year 1741, on Bering’s Island. It was a 
huge amphibious mammal, weighing not less than eight thou¬ 
sand pounds, and appears to have been confined exclusively to 
the islands and coasts in the neighborhood of Bering’s Strait. 
Its flesh was very palatable, and the localities it frequented 
were easily accessible from the Russian establishments in 
Kamtschatka. As soon as its existence and character, and the 
abundance of fur animals in the same waters, weie made 
known to the occupants of those posts by the return of the 
survivors of Bering’s expedition, so active a chase was com¬ 
menced against the amphibia of that region, that, in the course 
of twenty-seven years, the sea cow, described by Steller as 
extremely numerous in 1741, is believed to have been com¬ 
pletely extirpated, not a single individual having been seen 
since the year 1768. The various tribes of seals in the !Noith¬ 
em and Southern Pacific, the walrus and the sea otter, are 
already so reduced in numbers that they seem destined soon 


120 


DESTRUCTION OF FISH BY MAN. 


to follow the sea cow, unless protected by legislation stringent 
enough, and a police energetic enough, to repress the ardent 
cupidity of their pursuers. 

The seals, the otter tribe, and many other amphibia which 
feed almost exclusively upon fish, are extremely voracious, and 
of course their destruction or numerical reduction must have 
favored the multiplication of the species of fish principally 
preyed upon by them. I have been assured by the keeper of 
several tamed seals that, if supplied at frequent intervals, each 
seal would devour not less than fourteen pounds of fish, or 
about a quarter of his own weight, in a day.* A very intel¬ 
ligent and observing hunter, who has passed a great part of his 
life in the forest, after carefully watching the habits of the 
fresh-water otter of the Northern American States, estimates 
their consumption of fish at about four pounds per day. 

Man has promoted the multiplication of fish by making 
war on their brute enemies, but he has by no means thereby 
compensated his own greater destructiveness.f The bird and 
beast of prey, whether on land or in the water, hunt only as 
long as they feel the stimulus of hunger, their ravages are 
limited by the demands of present appetite, and they do not 
wastefully destroy what they cannot consume. Man, on the 

* See page 89, note, ante. 

t According to Hartwig, the United Provinces of Holland had, in 1618, 
three thousand herring busses and nine thousand vessels engaged in the 
transport of these fish to market. The whole number of persons employed 
in the Dutch herring fishery was computed at 200,000. 

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, this fishery was most suc¬ 
cessfully prosecuted by the Swedes, and in 1781, the town of Gottenburg 
alone exported 136,649 barrels, each containing 1,200 herrings, making a 
total of about 164,000,000; but so rapid was the exhaustion of the fish, 
from this keen pursuit, that in 1799 it was found necessary to prohibit the 
exportation of them altogether .—Das Leben des Meeres , p. 182. 

In 1855, the British fisheries produced 900,000 barrels, or enough to 
supply a fish to every human inhabitant of the globe. 

On the shores of Long Island Sound, the white fish, a species of herring 
too bony to be easily eaten, is used aS manure in very great quantities. 
Ten thousand are employed as a dressing for an acre, and a single net has 
sometimes taken 200,000 in a day.— Dwight’s Travels , ii, pp. 512, 515. 


FISH ARTIFICIALLY FATTENED INFERIOR. 


121 


contrary, angles to-day that lie may dine to-morrow; he takes 
and dries millions of fish on the banks of Newfoundland, that 
the fervent Catholic of the shores of the Mediterranean may 
have wherewithal to satisfy the cravings of the stomach during 
next year’s Lent, without imperilling his soul by violating the 
discipline of the papal church ; and. all the arrangements of 
his fisheries are so organized as to involve the destruction of 
many more fish than are secured for human use, and the loss 
of a large proportion of the annual harvest of the sea in the 
process of curing, or in transportation to the places of its 
consumption.* 

Fish are more affected than quadrupeds by slight and even 
imperceptible differences in their breeding places and feeding 
grounds. Every river, every brook, every lake stamps a spe¬ 
cial character upon its salmon, its shad, and its trout, which is 
at once recognized by those who deal in or consume them. 
No skill can give the fish fattened by food selected and pre¬ 
pared by man the flavor of those which are nourished at the 
table of nature, and the trout of the artificial ponds in Ger¬ 
many and Switzerland are so inferior to the brook fish of the 
same species and climate, that it is hard to believe them iden¬ 
tical. The superior sapidity of the American trout to the 

* The indiscriminate hostility of man to inferior forms of animated life 
is little creditable to modern civilization, and it is painful to reflect that it 
becomes keener and more unsparing in proportion to the refinement of the 
race. The savage slays no animal, not even the rattlesnake, wantonly; 
and the Turk, whom we call a barbarian, treats the dumb beast as gently 
as a child. One cannot live many weeks in Turkey without witnessing 
touching instances of the kindness of the people to the lower animals, and 
I have found it very difficult to induce even the boys to catch lizards and 
other reptiles for preservation as specimens. 

The fearless confidence in man, so generally manifested by wild animals 
in newly discovered islands, ought to have inspired a gentler treatment of 
them; but a very few years of the relentless pursuit, to which they are 
immediately subjected, suffice to make them as timid as the wildest inhab¬ 
itants of the European forest. This timidity, however, may easily be over¬ 
come. The squirrels introduced by Mayor Smith into the public parks of 
Boston are so tame as to feed from the hands of passengers, and they not 
unfrequently enter the neighboring houses. 


122 MAN SPECIALLY DESTRUCTIVE TO AQUATIC ANIMALS. 

European species, which, is familiar to every one acquainted 

with both continents, is probably due less to specific difference 

than to the fact that, even in the parts of the blew World. 

which have been longest cultivated, wild nature is not yet 

tamed down to the character it has assumed in the Old, and 

' 

which it wfill acquire in America also when her civilization 
shall be as ancient as is now that of Europe. 

Man has hitherto hardly anywhere produced such climatic 
or other changes as would suffice of themselves totally to banish 
the wild inhabitants of the dry land, and the disappearance of 
the native birds and quadrupeds from particular localities is to 
be ascribed quite as much to his direct persecutions as to the 
want of forest shelter, of appropriate food, or of other conditions 
indispensable to their existence. But almost all the processes 
of agriculture, and of mechanical and chemical industry, are 
fatally destructive to aquatic animals within reach of their 
influence. When, in consequence of clearing the woods, the 
changes already described as thereby produced in the beds 
and currents of rivers, are in progress, the spawning grounds 
of fish are exposed from year to year to a succession of me¬ 
chanical disturbances ; the temperature of the water is higher 
in summer, colder in winter, than when it was shaded and 
protected by wood; the smaller organisms, which formed the 
sustenance of the young fry, disappear or are reduced in num¬ 
bers, and new enemies are added to the old foes that preyed 
upon them; the increased turbidness of the water in the 
annual inundations chokes the fish; and, finally, the quick¬ 
ened velocity of its current sweeps them down into the larger 
rivers or into the sea, before they are yet strong enough to 
support so great a change of circumstances.* Industrial oper- 

* A fact mentioned by Schubert—and which in its causes and many of 
its results corresponds almost precisely with those connected with the 
escape of Barton Pond in Vermont, so well known to geological students— 
is important, as showing that the diminution of the fish in rivers exposed 
to inundations is chiefly to be ascribed to the mechanical action of the 
current, and not mainly, as some have supposed, to changes of temperature 
occasioned by clearing. Our author states that, in 1796, a terrible inun- 


MINUTE ORGANISMS. 


123 


ations are not less destructive to fish which live or spawn in 
fresh water. Mill dams impede their migrations, if they do 
not absolutely prevent them, the sawdust from lumber mills 
clogs their gills, and the thousand deleterious mineral sub¬ 
stances, discharged into rivers from metallurgical, chemical, 
and manufacturing establishments, poison them by shoals. 

Minute Organisms. 

Besides the larger creatures of the land and of the sea, the 
quadrupeds, the reptiles, the birds, the amphibia, the Crus¬ 
tacea, the fish, the insects, and the worms, there are other 
countless forms of vital being. Earth, water, the ducts and 
fluids of vegetable and of animal life, the very air we breathe, 
are peopled by minute organisms which perform most import¬ 
ant functions in both the living and the inanimate kingdoms 
of nature. Of the offices assigned to these creatures, the most 
familiar to common observation is the extraction of lime, and 
more rarely, of silex, from the waters inhabited by them, and 
the deposit of these minerals in a solid form, either as the 
material of their habitations or as the exuviae of their bodies. 
The microscope and other means of scientific observation 
assure us that the chalk beds of England and of France, the 
coral reefs of marine waters in w T arm climates, vast calcareous 
and silicious deposits in the sea and in many fresh-water 
ponds, the common polishing earths and slates, and many 
species of apparently dense and solid rock, are the work of the 
humble organisms of which I speak, often, indeed, of animal- 
culse so small as to become visible only by the aid of lenses 
magnifying a hundred times the linear measures. It is pop- 

dation was produced in the Indalself, which rises in the Storsjo in Jemtland, 
by drawing off into it the waters of another lake near Ragunda. The flood 
destroyed houses and fields; much earth was swept into the channel, and 
the water made turbid and muddy; the salmon and the smaller fish for¬ 
sook the river altogether, and never returned. The banks of the river 
have never regained their former solidity, and portions of their soil are 
still continually falling into the water .—Bern genom Sverge , ii, p. 51. 


124 


MINUTE ORGANISMS. 


ularly supposed that animalcule, or wliat are commonly em¬ 
braced under the vague name of infusorise, inhabit the water 
alone, but the atmospheric dust transported by every wind 
and deposited by every calm is full of microscopic life or of its 
relics. The soil on which the city of Berlin stands, contains 
at the depth of ten or fifteen feet below the surface, living 
elaborates of silex; * and a microscopic examination of a 
handful of earth connected with the material evidences of 
guilt has enabled the naturalist to point out the very spot 
where a crime was committed. It has been computed that 
one sixth part of the solid matter let fall by great rivers at 
their outlets consists of still recognizable infusory shells and 
shields, and, as the friction of rolling water must reduce much 
of these fragile structures to a state of comminution which 
even the microscope cannot resolve into distinct particles and 
identify as relics of animal or of vegetable life, we must con¬ 
clude that a considerably larger proportion of river deposits is 
really the product of animalcules.f 

It is evident that the chemical, and in many cases the 
mechanical character of a great number of the objects impor¬ 
tant in the material economy of human life, must be affected 
by the presence of so large an organic element in their sub¬ 
stance, and it is equally obvious that all agricultural and all 
industrial operations tend to disturb the natural arrangements 
of this element, to increase or to diminish the special adaptation 
of every medium in which it lives to the particular order of 

* Witt wee, Pliysilcalische Geographic, p. 142. 

t To vary the phrase, I make occasional use of animalcule, which, as a 
popular designation, embraces all microscopic organisms. The name is 
founded on the now exploded supposition that all of them are animated, 
which v r as the general belief of naturalists when attention was first drawn 
to them. It was soon discovered that many of them were unquestionably 
vegetable, and there are numerous genera the true classification of w T hich 
is matter of dispute among the ablest observers. There are cases in which 
objects formerly taken for living animalcules turn out to be products of the 
decomposition of matter once animated, and it is admitted that neither 
spontaneous motion nor even apparent irritability are sure signs of animal 
life. 


POSSIBLE CONTROL OF MINUTE LIFE. 125 

being inhabited by it. The conversion of woodland into pas¬ 
turage, of pasture into plough land, of swamp or of shallow 
sea into dry ground, the rotations of cultivated crops, must 
prove fatal to millions of living things upon every rood of 
surface thus deranged by man, and must, at the same time, 
more or less fully compensate this destruction of life by pro¬ 
moting the growth and multiplication of other tribes equally 
minute in dimensions. 

I do not know that man has yet endeavored to avail him¬ 
self, by artificial contrivances, of the agency of these wonder¬ 
ful architects and manufacturers. We are hardly well enough 
acquainted with their natural economy to devise means to turn 
their industry to profitable account, and they are in very 
many cases too slow in producing visible results for an age so 
impatient as ours. The over-civilization of the nineteenth cen¬ 
tury cannot wait for wealth to be amassed by infinitesimal 
gains, and we are in haste to speculate upon the powers of 
nature, as we do upon objects of bargain and sale in our traf¬ 
ficking one with another. But there are still some cases where 
the little we know of a life, whose workings are invisible to 
the naked eye, suggests the possibility of advantageously 
directing the efforts of troops of artisans that we cannot see. 
Upon coasts occupied by the corallines, the reef-building ani¬ 
malcule does not work near the mouth of rivers. Hence the 
change of the outlet of a stream, often a very easy matter, may 
promote the construction of a barrier to coast navigation at one 
point, and check the formation of a reef at another, by divert¬ 
ing a current of fresh water from the former and pouring it 
into the sea at the latter. Cases may probably be found in 
tropical seas, where rivers have prevented the working of the 
coral animalcules in straits separating islands from each other 
or from the mainland. The diversion of such streams might 
remove this obstacle, and reefs consequently be formed which 
should convert an archipelago into a single large island, and 
finally join that to the neighboring continent. 

Quatrefages proposed to destroy the teredo in harbors by 
impregnating the water with a mineral solution fatal to them. 


12G 


POSSIBLE CONTROL OF MINUTE LIFE. 


Perhaps the labors of the coralline animals might be arrested 
over a considerable extent of sea coast by similar means. The 
reef builders are leisurely architects, but the precious coral 
is formed so rapidly that the beds may be refished advan¬ 
tageously as often as once in ten years.* It does not seem 
impossible that this coral might be transplanted to the Amer¬ 
ican coast, where the Gulf stream would furnish a suitable 
temperature beyond the climatic limits that otherwise confine 
its growth ; and thus a new source of profit might perhaps be 
added to the scanty returns of the hardy fisherman. 

In certain geological formations, the diatomacese deposit, at 
the bottom of fresh-water ponds, beds of silicious shields, val¬ 
uable as a material for a species of very light firebrick, in the 
manufacture of water glass and of hydraulic cement, and ulti¬ 
mately, doubtless, in many yet undiscoverd industrial pro¬ 
cesses. An attentive study of the conditions favorable to the 
propagation of the diatomacese might perhaps help us to profit 
directly by the productivity of this organism, and, at the same 
time, disclose secrets of nature capable of being turned to 
valuable account in dealing with silicious rocks, and the metal 
which is the base of them. Our acquaintance with the obscure 
and infinitesimal life of which I have now been treating is 
very recent, and still very imperfect. We know that it is of 
vast importance in the economy of nature, but we are so ambi¬ 
tious to grasp the great, so little accustomed to occupy our¬ 
selves with the minute, that we are not yet prepared to enter 
seriously upon the question how far we can control and direct 
the operations, not of unembodied physical forces, but of 
beings, in popular apprehension, almost as immaterial as they. 

Nature has no unit of magnitude by which she measures 
her works. Man takes his standards of dimension from him¬ 
self. The hair’s breadth was his minimum until the micro¬ 
scope told him that there are animated creatures to which one 

* See an interesting report on the coral fishery, by Sant’ Agabio, Italian 
Consul-General at Algiers, in the Bollettino Gonsolare , published by the 
Department of Foreign Affairs, 1862, pp. 139, 151, and in the Annali di 
Agricoltura , Industrial e Commercio , No. ii, pp. 360, 373. 


NO NATURAL STANDARD OF MAGNITUDE. 127 

of the liairs of liis head is a larger cylinder than is the trunk 
of the giant California redwood to him. He borrows his inch 
from the breadth of his thumb, his palm and span from the 
width of his hand or the spread of his fingers, his foot from 
the length of the organ so named; his cubit is the distance 
from the tip of his middle finger to his elbow, and his fathom 
is the space he can measure with his outstretched arms. To a 
being who instinctively finds the standard of all magnitudes 
in his own material frame, all objects exceeding his own di¬ 
mensions are absolutely great, all falling short of them abso¬ 
lutely small. Hence we habitually regard the whale and the 
elephant as essentially large and therefore important crea¬ 
tures, the animalcule as an essentially small and therefore 
unimportant organism. But no geological formation owes its 
origin to the labors or the remains of the huge mammal, while 
the animalcule composes, or has furnished, the substance of 
strata thousands of feet in thickness, and extending, in un¬ 
broken beds, over many degrees of terrestrial surface. If man 
is destined to inhabit the earth much longer, and to advance 
in natural knowledge with the rapidity which has marked his 
progress in physical science for the last two or three centuries, 
he will learn to put a wiser estimate on the works of creation, 
and will derive not only great instruction from studying the 
ways of nature in her obscurest, humblest walks, but great 
material advantage from stimulating her productive energies 
in provinces of her empire hitherto regarded as forever inacces¬ 
sible, utterly barren.* 

* The fermentation of liquids, and in many cases the decomposition of 
semi-solids, formerly supposed to be owing purely to chemical action, are 
now ascertained to he due to vital processes of living minute organisms 
both vegetable and animal, and consequently to physiological, as well as to 
chemical forces. Even alcohol is stated to be an animal product. See an 
interesting article by Auguste Langel on the recent researches of Pasteur, 
in the Revue des Deux Mondes , for September 15th, 1863. 


CHAPTER III 


THE WOODS. 

THE HABITABLE EARTH ORIGINALLY "WOODED—THE FOREST DOES NOT FURNISH 
FOOD FOR MAN—FIRST REMOVAL OF THE WOODS—EFFECTS OF FIRE ON FOREST 
SOIL-EFFECTS OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST—ELECTRICAL INFLU¬ 

ENCE OF TREES—CHEMICAL INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST. 

INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST, CONSIDERED AS INORGANIC MATTER, ON TEM¬ 
PERATURE : a, ABSORBING AND EMITTING SURFACE ; 6, TREES AS CONDUCTORS 
OF HEAT ; C, TREES IN SUMMER AND IN WINTER ; </, DEAD PRODUCTS OF 

TREES; e, TREES AS A SHELTER TO GROUNDS TO THE LEEWARD OF THEM; 

/, TREES AS A PROTECTION AGAINST MALARIA—THE FOREST, AS INORGANIC 
MATTER, TENDS TO MITIGATE EXTREMES. 

TREES AS ORGANISMS : SPECIFIC TEMPERATURE—TOTAL INFLUENCE OF 
THE FOREST ON TEMPERATURE. 

INFLUENCE OF FORESTS ON THE HUMIDITY OF THE AIR AND THE EARTH : 

a, AS INORGANIC MATTER ; 6, AS ORGANIC-WOOD MOSSES AND FUNGI—FLOW 

OF SAP—ABSORPTION AND EXHALATION OF MOISTURE BY TREES—BALANCE OF 
CONFLICTING INFLUENCES—INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON TEMPERATURE AND 

PRECIPITATION-INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON THE HUMIDITY OF THE SOIL- 

ITS INFLUENCE ON THE FLOW OF SPRINGS—GENERAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE 
DESTRUCTION OF THE WOODS—LITERATURE AND CONDITION OF THE FOREST 
IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES—THE INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON INUNDATIONS 
—DESTRUCTIVE ACTION OF TORRENTS—THE PO AND ITS DEPOSITS—MOUNTAIN 
SLIDES—PROTECTION AGAINST THE FALL OF ROCKS AND AVALANCHES BY 
TREES—PRINCIPAL CAUSES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST—AMERICAN 
FOREST TREES—SPECIAL CAUSES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF EUROPEAN WOODS 
—ROYAL FORESTS AND GAME LAWS—SMALL FOREST PLANTS, VITALITY OF 
SEEDS—UTILITY OF THE FOREST—THE FORESTS OF EUROPE—FORESTS OF THE 

UNITED STATES AND CANADA-THE ECONOMY OF THE FOREST-EUROPEAN AND 

AMERICAN TREES COMPARED—SYLVICULTURE—INSTABILITY OF AMERICAN 
LIFE. 

The Habitable Earth Originally Wooded. 

There is good reason to believe that the surface of the hab¬ 
itable earth, in all the climates and regions which have been 
the abodes of dense and civilized populations, was, with few 


EARTH ORIGINALLY WOODED. 


129 


exceptions, already covered with a forest growth when it first 
became the home of man. This we infer from the extensive 
vegetable remains—trunks, branches, roots, fruits, seeds, and 
leaves of trees—so often found in conjunction with works of 
primitive art, in the boggy soil of districts where no forests 
appear to have existed within the eras through which written 
annals reach ; from ancient historical records, which prove that 
large provinces, where the earth has long been wholly bare of 
trees, were clothed with vast and almost unbroken woods 
when first made known to Greek and Roman civilization; * 
and from the state of much of North and of South America 
when they were discovered and colonized by the European 
race.f 

These evidences are strengthened by observation of the 
natural economy of our own time; for, whenever a tract of 
country, once inhabited and cultivated by man, is abandoned 
by him and by domestic animals,^; and surrendered to the 

* The recorded evidence in support of the proposition in the text has 
been collected by L. F. Alfred Maury, in his Histoire des grandes Forets de 
la Gaule et de Vancienne France , and by Becquerel, in his important work, 
Des climats et de VInfluence qu'exercent les Sols boises et non boises , livre ii, 
chap, i to iv. 

We may rank among historical evidences on this point, if not tech¬ 
nically among historical records, old geographical names and terminations 
etymologically indicating forest or grove, which are so common in many 
parts of the Eastern Continent now entirely stripped of woods—such as, 
in Southern Europe, Breuil, Broglio, Brolio, Brolo; in Northern, Briihl, 
-wald, -wold, -wood, -shaw, -skcg, and -skov. 

i The island of Madeira, whose noble forests were devastated by fire 
not long after its colonization by European settlers, derives its name from 
the Portuguese word for wood. 

1 Browsing animals, and most of all the goat, are considered by foresters 
as more injurious to the growth of young trees, and, therefore, to the repro¬ 
duction of the forest, than almost any other destructive cause. “Accord¬ 
ing to Beatson’s Saint Helena , introductory chapter, and Darwin’s Journal 
of Researches in Geology and Natural History , pp. 582, 583,” says Emsmann, 
in the notes to his translation of Foissac, p. 654, “it was the goats which 
destroyed the beautiful forests that, three hundred and fifty years ago, 
covered a continuous surface of not less than two thousand acres in the 
9 


130 


EARTH ORIGINALLY WOODED. 


undisturbed influences of spontaneous nature, its soil sooner or 
later clothes itself with herbaceous and arborescent plants, and, 
at no long interval, with a dense forest growth. Indeed, upon 
surfaces of a certain stability, and not absolutely precipitous 
inclination, the special conditions required for the spontaneous 

interior of the island [of St. Helena], not to mention scattered groups of 
trees. Darwin observes: ‘During our stay at Valparaiso, I was most 
positively assured that sandal wood formerly grew in abundance on the 
island of Juan Fernandez, but that this tree had now become entirely 
extinct there, having been extirpated by the goats which early navigators 
had introduced. The neighboring islands, to which goats have not been 
carried, still abound in sandal wood.’ ” 

In the winter, the deer tribe, especially the great American moose 
deer, subsists much on the buds and young sprouts of trees ; yet—though 
from the destruction of the wolves or from some not easily explained 
cause, these latter animals have recently multiplied so rapidly in some 
parts of Forth America, that, not long since, four hundred of them are 
said to have been killed, in one season, on a territory in Maine not com¬ 
prising more than one hundred and fifty square miles—the wild browsing 
quadrupeds are rarely, if ever, numerous enough in regions uninhabited 
by man to produce any sensible effect on the condition of the forest. A 
reason why they are less injurious than the goat to young trees may be 
that they resort to this nutriment only in the winter, when the grasses and 
shrubs are leafless or covered with snow, whereas the goat feeds upon buds 
and young shoots principally in the season of growth. However this may 
be, the natural law of consumption and supply keeps the forest growth, 
and the wild animals which live on its products, in such a state of equilib¬ 
rium as to insure the indefinite continuance of both, and the perpetuity 
of neither is endangered until man, who is above natural law, interferes 
and destroys the balance. 

When, however, deer are bred and protected in parks, they multiply 
like domestic cattle, and become equally injurious to trees. “ A few years 
ago,” says Clav6, “there were not less than two thousand deer of different 
ages in the forest of Fontainebleau. For want of grass, they are driven to 
the trees, and they do not spare them. * * It is calculated that the 
browsing of these animals, and the consequent retardation of the growth 
of the wood, diminishes the annual product of the forest to the amount 
of two hundred thousand cubic feet per year, * * and besides this, the 

trees thus mutilated are soon exhausted and die. The deer attack the 
pines, too, tearing off the bark in long strips, or rubbing their heads 
against them when shedding their horns; and sometimes, in groves of 


VEGETATION IN VOLCANIC MATTER. 


131 


propagation of trees may all be negatively expressed and 
reduced to these three : exemption from defect or excess of 
moisture, from perpetual frost, and from the depredations of 
man and browsing quadrupeds. Where these requisites are 
secured, the hardest rock is as certain to be overgrown with 
wood as the most fertile plain, though, for obvious reasons, the 
pr ocess is slower in the former than in the latter case. Lichens 
and mosses first prepare the way for a more highly organized 
vegetation. They retain the moisture of rains and dews, and 
bring it to act, in combination with the gases evolved by their 
organic processes, in decomposing the surface of the rocks they 
cover; they arrest and confine the dust which the wind scat¬ 
ters over them, and their final decay adds new material to the 
soil already half formed beneath and upon them. A very thin 
stratum of mould is sufficient for the germination of seeds of 
the hardy evergreens and birches, the roots of which are often 
found in immediate contact with the rock, supplying their 
trees with nourishment from a soil derived from the decompo¬ 
sition of their own foliage, or sending out long rootlets into 
the surrounding earth in search of juices to feed them. 

The eruptive matter of volcanoes, forbidding as is its as¬ 
pect, does not refuse nutriment to the woods. The refractory 
lava of Etna, it is true, remains long barren, and that of the 
great eruption of 1669 is still almost wholly devoid of vegeta¬ 
tion.* But the cactus is making inroads even here, while the 
volcanic sand and molten rock thrown out by Vesuvius soon 

more than a hundred hectares, not one pine is found uninjured by them.”— 
Revue des Deux Mondes , Mai, 1863, p. 157. 

Beckstein computes that a park of 2,600 acres, containing 250 acres of 
marsh, 250 of fields and meadows, and the remaining 2,000 of wood, may 
keep 364 deer of different species, 47 wild boars, 200 hares, 100 rabbits, 
and an indefinite number of pheasants. These animals would require, in 
winter, 123,000 pounds of hay, and 22,000 pounds of potatoes, besides 
what they would pick up themselves. The natural forest most thickly 
peopled with wild animals would not, in temperate climates, contain, upon 
the average, one tenth of these numbers to the same extent of surface. 

* Even the volcanic dust of Etna remains very long unproductive. 
Nhar Nicolosi is a great extent of coarse black sand, thrown out in 1669, 


132 


VEGETATION IN DESEETS. 


becomes productive. George Sandy s, who visited this latter 
mountain in 1611, after it had reposed for several centuries, 
found the throat of the volcano at the bottom of the crater 
“ almost choked with broken rocks and trees that are falne 
therein.’’ “ Next to this,” he continues, “ the matter thrown 
up is ruddy, light, and soft: more removed, blacke and pon¬ 
derous : the uttermost brow, that declineth like the seates in a 
theater, flourishing with trees and excellent pasturage. The 
midst of the hill is shaded with chestnut trees, and others 
bearing sundry fruits.” * 

I am convinced that forests would soon cover many parts 
of the Arabian and African deserts, if man and domestic ani¬ 
mals, especially the goat and the camel, were banished from 
them. The hard palate and tongue and strong teeth and jaws 
of this latter quadruped enable him to break off and masticate 
tough and thorny branches as large as the finger. He is par¬ 
ticularly fond of the smaller twigs, leaves, and seedpods of 
the sont and other acacias, which, like the American Robinia, 

which, for almost two centuries, lay entirely bare, and can be made to 
grow plants only by artificial mixtures and much labor. 

The increase in the price of wines, in consequence of the diminution of 
the product from the grape disease, however, has brought even these ashes 
under cultivation. “I found,” says Waltershausen, referring to the years 
1861—’62, “plains of volcanic sand and half-subdued lava streams, which, 
twenty years ago lay utterly waste, now covered with fine vineyards. The 
ashfield of ten square miles above Nicolosi, created by the eruption of 1669, 
which was entirely barren in 1835, is now planted with vines almost to 
the summits of Monte Rosso, at a height of three thousand feet.”— TJeber 
den Sicilianischen Ackerbau , p. 19. 

* A Relation of a Journey Begun An. Bom. 1610, lib. 4, p. 260, edition 
of 1627. The testimony of Sandys on this point is confirmed by that of 
Pighio, Braccini, Magliocco, Salimbeni, and Nicola di Rubeo, all cited by 
Roth, Der Yesuv ., p. 9. There is some uncertainty about the date of the 
last eruption previous to the great one of 1631. Ashes, though not lava, 
appear to have been thrown out about the year 1500, and some chroniclers 
have recorded an eruption in the year 1306 ; but this seems to be an error 
for 1036, when a great quantity of lava was ejected. In 1139, ashes were 
thrown out for many days. I take these dates from the work of Roth 
just cited. 


FOREST FURNISHES NO FOOD FOR MAN. 


133 


thrive well on dry and sandy soils, and lie spares no tree, tlie 
branches of which are within his reach, except, if I remember 
right, the tamarisk that produces manna. Young trees sprout 
plentifully around the springs, and along the winter water¬ 
courses of the desert, and these are just the halting stations of 
the caravans and their routes of travel. In the shade of these 
trees, annual grasses and perennial shrubs shoot up, but are 
mown down by the hungry cattle of the Bedouin, as fast as 
they grow. A few years of undisturbed vegetation would 
suffice to cover such points with groves, and these would grad¬ 
ually extend themselves over soils where now scarcely any 
green thing but the bitter colocyntli and the poisonous fox¬ 
glove is ever seen. 

The Forest does not Furnish Food for Man . 

In a region absolutely covered with trees, human life could 
not long be sustained, for want of animal and vegetable food. 
The depths of the forest seldom furnish either bulb or fruit 
suited to the nourishment of man ; and the fowls and beasts 
on which he feeds are scarcely seen except upon the margin 
of the wood, for here only grow the shrubs and grasses, and 
here only are found the seeds and insects, which form the sus¬ 
tenance of the non-carnivorous birds and quadrupeds." 


* Except upon the hanks of rivers or of lakes, the woods of the interior 
of North America, far from the habitations of man, are almost destitute of 
animal life. Dr. Newberry, describing the vast forests of the yellow pine 
of the West, Finns ponderosa , remarks : “ In the arid and desert regions 
of the interior basin, we made whole days’ marches in forests of yellow 
pine, of which neither the monotony was broken by other forms of vege¬ 
tation, nor its stillness by the flutter of a bird or the hum of an insect.”— 
Pacific Railroad Report , vol. vi, 1857. Dr. Newbeeey’s Report on Botany , 

p. 87. 

The wild fruit and nut trees, the Canada plum, the cherries, the many 
species of walnut, the butternut, the hazel, yield very little, frequently 
nothing, so long as they grow in the woods ; and it is only when the trees 
around them are cut down, or when they grow in pastures, that they be¬ 
come productive. The berries, too—the strawberry, the blackberry, the 


134 . 


REMOVAL OF THE FOREST. 


First Removal of the Forest. 

As soon as multiplying man had filled the open grounds 
along the margin of the rivers, the lakes, and the sea, and suffi¬ 
ciently peopled the natural meadows and savannas of the 
interior, where such existed,* he could find room for expansion 

raspberry, the whortleberry, scarcely bear fruit at all except in cleared 
ground. 

The North American Indians did not inhabit the interior of the forests. 
Their settlements were upon the shores of rivers and lakes, and their 
weapons and other relics are found only in the narrow open grounds 
which they had burned over and cultivated, or in the margin of the woods 
around their villages. 

The rank forests of the tropics are as unproductive of human aliment as 
the less luxuriant woods of the temperate zone. In Strain’s unfortunate 
expedition across the great American isthmus, where the journey lay 
principally through thick woods, several of the party died of starvation, 
and for many days the survivors were forced to subsist on the scantiest 
supplies of unnutritious vegetables perhaps never before employed for 
food by man. See the interesting account of that expedition in Harper's 
Magazine for March, April, and May, 1855. 

Clave, as well as many earlier writers, supposes that primitive man de¬ 
rived his nutriment from the spontaneous productions of the wood. “ It 
is to the forests,” says he, “ that man was first indebted for the means of 
subsistence. Exposed alone, without defence, to the rigor of the seasons, 
as well as to the attacks of animals stronger and swifter than himself, he 
found in them his first shelter, drew from them his first weapons. In 
the first period of humanity, they provided for all his wants: they fur¬ 
nished him wood for warmth, fruits for food, garments to cover his naked- 

/ / 

ness, arms for his defence .”—Etudes sur V Economic Eorestidre , p. 13. 

But the history of savage life, as far as it is known to us, presents man 
in that condition as inhabiting only the borders of the forest and the open 
grounds that skirt the waters and the woods, and as finding only there the 
aliments which make up his daily bread. 

* The origin of the great natural meadows, or prairies as they are 
called, of the valley of the Mississippi, is obscure. There is, of course, no 
historical evidence on the subject, and I believe that remains of forest 
vegetation are seldom or never found beneath the surface, even in the 
sloughs , where the perpetual moisture would preserve such remains indefi¬ 
nitely. The want of trees upon them has been ascribed to the occasional 
long-continued droughts of summer, and the excessive humidity of the soil 


REMOVAL OF THE FOREST. 


135 


and further growth, only by the removal of a portion of the 
forest that hemmed him in. The destruction of the woods, 
then, was man’s first physical conquest, his first violation of 
the harmonies of inanimate nature. 

Primitive man had little occasion to fell trees for fuel, or, 

in winter; but it is, in very many instances, certain that, by whatever 
means the growth of forests upon them was first prevented or destroyed, 
the trees have been since kept out of them only by the annual burning of 
the grass, by grazing animals, or by cultivation. The groves and belts of 
trees which are found upon the prairies, though their seedlings are occa¬ 
sionally killed by drought, or by excess of moisture, extend themselves 
rapidly over them when the seeds and shoots are protected against fire, 
cattle, and the plough. The prairies, though of vast extent, must be con¬ 
sidered as a local, and, so far as our present knowledge extends, abnormal 
exception to the law which clothes all suitable surfaces with forest; for 
there are many parts of the United States—Ohio, for example—where the 
physical conditions appear to be nearly identical with those of the States 
lying farther west, but where there were comparatively few natural 
meadows. The prairies were the proper feeding grounds of the bison, 
and the vast number of those animals is connected, as cause or conse¬ 
quence, with the existence of these vast pastures. The bison, indeed, 
could not convert the forest into a pasture, but he would do much to pre¬ 
vent the pasture from becoming a forest. 

There is positive evidence that some of the American tribes possessed 
large herds of domesticated bisons. See Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur , 
i, pp. 71-73. What authorizes us to affirm that this was simply the wild 
bison reclaimed, and why may we not, with equal probability, believe that 
the migratory prairie buffalo is the progeny of the domestic animal run wild? 

There are, both on the prairies, as in Wisconsin, and in deep forests, as 
in Ohio, extensive remains of a primitive people, who must have been 
more numerous and more advanced in art than the present Indian tribes. 
There can be no doubt that the woods where such earthworks are found 
in Ohio were cleared by them, and that the vicinity of these fortresses or 
temples was inhabited by a large population. Nothing forbids the suppo¬ 
sition that the prairies were cleared by the same or a similar people, and 
that the growth of trees upon them has been prevented by fires and 
grazing, while the restoration of the woods in Ohio may be due to the 
abandonment of that region by its original inhabitants. Ihe climatic con¬ 
ditions unfavorable to the spontaneous growth of trees on the prairies may 
be an effect of too extensive clearings, rather than a cause of the want of 
woods. 


136 


BURNING OF FORESTS. 


for tlie construction of dwellings, boats, and the implements 
of his rude agriculture and handicrafts. Windfalls would 
furnish a thin population with a sufficient supply of such 
material, and if occasionally a growing tree was cat, the injury 
to the forest would be too insignificant to be at all appreciable. 

The accidental escape and spread of fire, or, possibly, the 
combustion of forests by lightning, must have first suggested 
the advantages to be derived from the removal of too abun- 

O 

dant and extensive woods, and, at the same time, have pointed 
out a means by which a large tract of surface could readily be 
cleared of much of this natural incumbrance. As soon as agri¬ 
culture had commenced at all, it would be observed that the 
growth of cultivated plants, as well as of many species of wild 
vegetation, was particularly rapid and luxuriant on soils which 
had been burned over, and thus a new stimulus would be 
given to the practice of destroying the woods by fire, as a 
means of both extending the open grounds, and making the 
acquisition of a yet more productive soil. After a few har¬ 
vests had exhausted the first rank fertility of the virgin mould, 
or when weeds and briers and the sprouting roots of the trees 
had begun to choke the crops of the half-subdued soil, the 
ground would be abandoned for new fields won from the 
forest by the same means, and the deserted plain or hillock 
would soon clothe itself anew with shrubs and trees, to be 
again subjected to the same destructive process, and again sur¬ 
rendered to the restorative powers of vegetable nature.* This 

* In many parts of the North American States, the first white settlers 
found extensive tracts of thin woods, of a very park-like character, called 
“ oak openings,” from the predominance of different species of that tree 
upon them. These were the semi-artificial pasture grounds of the Indians, 
brought into that state, and so kept, by partial clearing, and by the annual 
burning of the grass. The object of this operation was to attract the deer 
to the fresh herbage which sprang up after the fire. The oaks bore the 
annual scorching, at least for a certain time ; but if it had been indefinitely 
continued, they would very probably have been destroyed at last. The 
soil would have then been much in the prairie condition, and. would have 
needed nothing but grazing for a long succession of years to make the re¬ 
semblance perfect. That the annual fires alone occasioned the peculiar 


EFFECTS OF BURNING FOREST. 


137 


rude economy would be continued for generations, and wasteful 
as it is, is still largely pursued in Northern Sweden, Swedish 
Lapland, and sometimes even in France and the United States.* 

character of the oak openings, is proved by the fact, that as soon as the 
Indians had left the country, young trees of many species sprang up and 
grew luxuriantly upon them. See a very interesting account of the oak 
openings in Dwight’s Travels , iv, pp. 58-63. 

* The practice of burning over woodland, at once to clear and manure 
the ground, is called in Swedish svedjande , a participial noun from the verb 
att svedja , to burn over. Though used in Sweden as a preparation for 
crops of rye or other grain, it is employed in Lapland more frequently to 
secure an abundant growth of pasturage, which follows in two or three 
years after the fire; and it is sometimes resorted to as a mode of driving 
the Laplanders and their reindeer from the vicinity of the Swedish back¬ 
woodsman’s grass grounds and haystacks, to which they are dangerous 
neighbors. The forest, indeed, rapidly recovers itself, but it is a genera¬ 
tion or more before the reindeer moss grows again. When the forest con¬ 
sists of pine, tall , the ground, instead of being rendered fertile by this 
process, becomes hopelessly barren, and for a long time afterward pro¬ 
duces nothing but weeds and briers.— L^estadius, Ora Uppodlingar i Lapp - 
marlcen , p. 15. See also Schubekt, Resa i Sverge, ii, p. 375. 

In some parts of France this practice is so general that Clav6 says: “ In 
the department of Ardennes it ( le sartage ) is the basis of agriculture. The 
northern part of the department, comprising the arrondissements of Rocroi 
and Mezi&res, is covered by steep wooded mountains with an argillaceous, 
compact, moist and cold soil; it is furrowed by three valleys, or rather 
three deep ravines, at the bottom of which roll the waters of the Meuse, 
the Semoy, and the Sormonne, and villages show themselves wherever the 
walls of the valleys retreat sufficiently from the rivers to give room to 
establish them. Deprived of arable soil, since the nature of the ground 
permits neither regular clearing nor cultivation, the peasant of the Ar¬ 
dennes, by means of burning, obtains from the forest a subsistence which, 
without this resource, would fail him. After the removal of the disposable 
wood, he spreads over the soil the branches, twigs, briars, and heath, seta 
fire to them in the dry weather of July and August, and sows in Septem¬ 
ber a crop of rye, which he covers by a light ploughing. Thus prepared, 
the ground yields from seventeen to twenty bushels an acre, besides a ton 
and a half or two tons of straw of the best quality for the manufacture of 
straw hats.”— Clave, Etudes sur VEconomie Forestibe , p. 21. 

Clave does not expressly condemn the sartage , which indeed seems the 
only practicable method of obtaining crops from the soil he describes, but, 
as we shall see hereafter, it is regarded by most writers as a highly per¬ 
nicious practice. 


138 


EFFECTS OF BURNING FOREST. 


Effects of Fire on Forest Soil. 

Aside from tlie mechanical and chemical effects of the dis¬ 
turbance of the soil by agricultural operations, and of the freer 
admission of sun, rain, and air to the ground, the fire of itself 
exerts an important influence on its texture and condition. It 
consumes a portion of the half-decayed vegetable mould which 
served to hold its mineral particles together, and to retain the 
water of precipitation, and thus loosens, pulverizes, and dries 
the earth; it destroys reptiles, insects, and worms, with their 
eggs, and the seeds of trees and of smaller plants ; it supplies, 
in the ashes which it deposits on the surface, important ele¬ 
ments for the growth of a new forest clothing, as well as of the 
usual objects of agricultural industry ; and by the changes thus 
produced, it fits the ground for the reception of a vegetation 
different in character from that which had spontaneously cov¬ 
ered it. These new conditions help to explain the natural 
succession of forest crops, so generally observed in all woods 
cleared by fire and then abandoned. There is no doubt, how¬ 
ever, that other influences contribute to the same result, 
because effects more or less analogous follow when the trees 
are destroyed by other causes, as by high winds, by the wood¬ 
man’s axe, and even by natural decay.* 

* The remarkable mounds and other earthworks constructed in the valley 
of the Ohio and elsewhere in the territory of the United States, by a people 
apparently more advanced in culture than the modern Indian, were over¬ 
grown with a dense clothing of forest when first discovered by the whites. 
But though the ground where they were erected must have been occupied 
by a large population for a considerable length of time, and therefore en¬ 
tirely cleared, the trees which grew upon the ancient fortresses and the 
adjacent lands were not distinguishable in species, or even in dimensions and 
character of growth, from the neighboring forests, where the soil seemed 
never to have been disturbed. This apparent exception to the law of change 
of crop in natural forest growth was ingeniously explained by General Har¬ 
rison’s suggestion, that the lapse of time since the era of the mound 
builders was so great as to have embraced several successive generations of 
trees, and occasioned, by their rotation, a return to the original vegetation. 

The successive changes in the spontaneous growth of the forest, as 


METEOROLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF FOREST, 


139 


Effects of Destruction of the Forest. 

The pbysico-geograpliical effects of the destruction of the 
forests may he divided into two great classes, each having an 
important influence on vegetable and on animal life in all their 
manifestations, as well as on every branch of rural economy 
and productive industry, and, therefore, on all the material 
interests of man. The first respects the meteorology of the 
countries exposed to the action of these influences ; the second, 
their superficial geography, or, in other words, configuration, 
consistence, and clothing of surface. 

For reasons assigned in the first chapter, the meteorological 
or climatic branch of the subject is the most obscure, and the 
conclusions of physicists respecting it are, in a great degree, 
inferential only, not founded on experiment or direct observa¬ 
tion. They are, as might be expected, somewhat discordant, 
though certain general results are almost universally accepted, 
and seem indeed too well supported to admit of serious question. 

proved by the character of the wood found in bogs, is not unfrequently 
such as to suggest the theory of a considerable change of climate during 
the human period. But the laws which govern the germination and 
growth of forest trees must be further studied, and the primitive local 
conditions of the sites where ancient woods lie buried must be better 
ascertained, before this theory can be admitted upon the evidence in ques¬ 
tion. In fact, the order of succession—for a rotation or alternation is not 
yet proved—may move in opposite directions in different countries with 
the same climate and at the same time. Thus in Denmark and in Holland 
the spike-leaved firs have given place to the broad-leaved beech, while in 
Northern Germany the process has been reversed, and evergreens have 
supplanted the oaks and birches of deciduous foliage. The principal de¬ 
termining cause seems to be the influence of light upon the germination of 
the seeds and the growth of the young tree. In a forest of firs, for in¬ 
stance, the distribution of the light and shade, to the influence of which 
seeds and shoots are exposed, is by no means the same as in a wood of 
beeches or of oaks, and hence the growth of different species will be 
stimulated in the two forests. See Berg, Das Verdrdngen der Laubwdlder 
im Nordlichen Deutschland , 1844. Heyer, Das Verhalten der Waldbaume 
gegen Licht und Schatlen , 1852. Staring, De Bodem ran Nederland, 1856, 
i, pp. 120-200. Yaupell, Om Bogens Didvandring i de DansTce Shove, 
1857. Knorr, Studien icber die Buchen - Wirthschaft , 1803. 


140 


ELECTEICAL INFLUENCE OF FOREST. 


Electrical Influence of Trees. 

The properties of trees, singly and in groups, as exciters or 
conductors of electricity, and their consequent influence upon 
the electrical state of the atmosphere, do not appear to have 
been much investigated; and the conditions of the forest itself 
are so variable and so complicated, that the solution of any 
general problem respecting its electrical influence would be a 
matter of extreme difficulty. It is, indeed, impossible to sup¬ 
pose that a dense cloud, a sea of vapor, can pass over miles of 
surface bristling with good conductors, without undergoing 
some change of electrical condition. Hypothetical cases may 
be put in which the character of the change could be deduced 
from the known laws of electrical action. But in actual 
nature, the elements are too numerous for us to seize. The 
true electrical condition of neither cloud nor forest could be 
known, and it could seldom be predicted whether the vapors 
would be dissolved as they floated over the wood, or discharged 
upon it in a deluge of rain. With regard to possible electrical 
influences of the forest, wider still in their range of action, the 
uncertainty is even greater. The data which alone could lead 
to certain, or even probable conclusions are wanting, and we 
should, therefore, only embarrass our argument by any attempt 
to discuss this meteorological element, important as it may be, 
in its relations of cause and effect to more familiar and better 
understood meteoric phenomena. It may, however, be observed 
that hail storms—which were once generally supposed, and are 
still held by many, to be produced by a specific electrical 
action, and which, at least, are always accompanied by elec¬ 
trical disturbances—are believed, in all countries particularly 
exposed to that scourge, to have become more frequent and 
destructive in proportion as the forests have been cleared. 
Caimi observes: “ When the chains of the Alps and the Apen¬ 
nines had not yet been stripped of their magnificent crown of 
woods, the May hail, which now desolates the fertile plains of 
Lombardy, was much less frequent; but since the general 
prostration of the forest, these tempests are laying waste even 


HAIL STORMS. 


141 


the mountain soils whose older inhabitants scarcely knew this 
plague.* The paragrandini, f which the learned cura/te of 
Idvolta advised to erect, with sheaves of straw set up verti¬ 
cally, over a great extent of cultivated country, are hut a Lili- 
putian image of the vast paragrandini, pines, larches, firs, 
which nature had planted by millions on the crests and ridges 
of the Alps and the Apennines.” J “ Electrical action being 
diminished,” says Meguscher, “ and the rapid congelation of 
vapors by the abstraction of heat being impeded by the influ¬ 
ence of the woods, it is rare that hail or waterspouts are 
produced within the precincts of a large forest when it is 
assailed by the tempest.” § Arthur Young was told that since 
the forests which covered the mountains between the Riviera 
and the county of Montferrat had disappeared, hail bad become 
more destructive in the district of Acqui, || and it appears 

* There are, in Northern Italy and in Switzerland, joint-stock compa¬ 
nies which insure against damage by hail, as well as by fire and lightning. 
Between the years 1854 and 1861, a single one of these companies, La 
Biunione Adriatica, paid, for damage by hail in Piedmont, Venetian Lom¬ 
bardy, and the Duchy of Parma, above 6,500,000 francs, or nearly $200,000 
per year. 

f The paragrandine , or, as it is called in French, the paragrele , is a 
species of conductor by which it has been hoped to protect the harvests in 
countries particularly exposed to damage by hail. It was at first proposed 
to employ for this purpose poles supporting sheaves of straw connected 
with the ground by the same material; but the experiment was after¬ 
ward tried in Lombardy on a large scale, with more perfect electrical con¬ 
ductors, consisting of poles secured to the top of tall trees and provided 
with a pointed wire entering the ground and reaching above the top of the 
pole. It was at first thought that this apparatus, erected at numerous 
points over an extent of several miles, was of some service as a protection 
against hail, but this opinion was soon disputed, and does not appear to be 
supported by well-ascertained facts. The question of a repetition of the 
experiment over a wide area has been again agitated within a very few 
years in Lombardy ; but the doubts expressed by very able physicists as to 
its efficacy, and as to the point whether hail is an electrical phenomenon, 
have discouraged its advocates from attempting it. 

J Genni sulla Irnportanza e Coltura dei Boschi , p. 6. 

§ Memoria sui Boschi , etc ., p. 44. 

| Travels in Italy , chap. iii. 


142 CHEMICAL AND METEOROLOGICAL INFLUENCE OF FORESTS. 

upon good authority, that a similar increase in the frequency 
and violence of hail storms in the neighborhood of Saluzzo 
and Mondovi, the lower part of the Valtelline, and the terri¬ 
tory of Verona and Vicenza, is probably to be ascribed to a 
similar cause.* 

Chemical Influence of the Forest. 

We know that the air in a close apartment is appreciably 
affected through the inspiration and expiration of gases by 
plants growing in it. The same operations are performed on 
a gigantic scale by the forest, and it has even been supposed 
that the absorption of carbon, by the rank vegetation of earlier 
geological periods, occasioned a permanent change in the con¬ 
stitution of the terrestrial atmosphere, f To the effects thus 
produced, are to be added those of the ultimate gaseous decom¬ 
position of the vast vegetable mass annually shed by trees, and 
of their trunks and branches when they fall a prey to time. 
But the quantity of gases thus abstracted from and restored 
to the atmosphere is inconsiderable—infinitesimal, one might 
almost say, in comparison with the ocean of air from which 
they are drawn and to which they return; and though the 
exhalations from bogs, and other low grounds covered with 
decaying vegetable matter, are highly deleterious to human 
health, yet, in general, the air of the forest is hardly chemi¬ 
cally distinguishable from that of the sand plains, and we can 
as little trace the influence of the woods in the analysis of the 
atmosphere, as we can prove that the mineral ingredients of 

* Le Alpi che cingono VItalia, i, p. 377. 

t “ Long before the appearance of man, * * * they [the forests] 
had robbed the atmosphere of the enormous quantity of carbonic acid it 
contained, and thereby transformed it into respirable air. Trees heaped 
upon trees had already filled up the ponds and marshes, and buried with 
them in the bowels of the earth—to restore it to us after thousands of ages 
in the form of bituminous coal and of anthracite—the carbon which was 
destined to become, by this wonderful condensation, a precious store of 
future wealth.” —Clave, Etudes sur VEconomie Forestiere , p. 13 . 

This opinion of the modification of the atmosphere by vegetation is 
contested. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON TEMPERATURE. 143 

land springs sensibly affect the chemistry of the sea. I may, 
then, properly dismiss the chemical, as I have done the elec¬ 
trical influences of .the forest, and treat them both alike, if not 
as unimportant agencies, at least as quantities of unknown 
value in our meteorological equation.* Our inquiries upon 
this branch of the subject will accordingly be limited to the 
tliermometrical and liygrometrical influences of the woods. 


Influence of the Forest , considered as Inorganic Matter , 

on Temperature. 

The evaporation of fluids, and the condensation and expan¬ 
sion of vapors and gases, are attended with changes of temper¬ 
ature ; and the quantity of moisture which the air is capable 
of containing, and, of course, the evaporation, rise and fall 
with the thermometer. The hygroscopical and the tliermo- 
scopical conditions of the atmosphere are, therefore, insep¬ 
arably connected as reciprocally dependent quantities, and 
neither can be fully discussed without taking notice of the 
other. But the forest, regarded purely as inorganic matter, 
and without reference to its living processes of absorption and 
exhalation of water and gases, has, as an absorbent, a radiator 
and a conductor of heat, and as a mere covering of the ground, 
an influence on the temperature of the air and the earth, which 
may be considered by itself. 

* Schacht ascribes to the forest a specific, if not a measurable, influence 
upon the constitution of the atmosphere. “ Plants imbibe from the air 
carbcnic acid and other gaseous or volatile products exhaled by animals or 
developed by the natural phenomena of decomposition. On the other 
hand, the vegetable pours into the atmosphere oxygen, which is taken up 
by animals and appropriated by them. The tree, by means of its leaves 
and its young herbaceous twigs, presents a considerable surface for absorp¬ 
tion and evaporation; it abstracts the carbon of carbonic acid, and solidifies 
it in wood, fecula, and a multitude of other compounds. The result is that 
a forest withdraws from the air, by its great absorbent surface, much more 
gas than meadows or cultivated fields, and exhales proportionally a con¬ 
siderably greater quantity of oxygen. The influence of the forests on the 
chemical composition of the atmosphere is, in a word, of the highest im¬ 
portance .”—Les ArbreSy p. 111. 


144 


ABSORBING AND EMITTING SURFACE. 


a. Absorbing and Emitting Surface. 

A given area of ground, as estimated by the every-day rule 
of measurement in yards or acres, presents always the same 
apparent quantity of absorbing, radiating, and reflecting sur¬ 
face ; but the real extent of that surface is very variable, 
depending, as it does, upon its configuration, and the bulk and 
form of the adventitious objects it bears upon it; and, besides, 
the true superficies remaining the same, its power of absorp¬ 
tion, radiation, reflection, and conduction of heat will be much 
affected by its consistence, its greater or less humidity, and its 
color, as well as by its inclination of plane and exposure.* 

* Composition, texture and color of soil are important elements to be 
considered in estimating the effects of the removal of the forest upon its 
thermoscopic action. “Experience has proved,” says Becquerel, “that 
when the soil is bared, it becomes more or less heated [by the rays of the 
sun] according to the nature and the color of the particles which compose 
it, and according to its humidity, and that, in the refrigeration resulting 
from radiation, we must take into the account the conducting power of 
those particles also. Other things being equal, silicious and calcareous 
sands, compared in equal volumes with different argillaceous earths, with 
calcareous powder or dust, with humus, with arable and with garden earth, 
are the soils which least conduct heat. It is for this reason that sandy 
ground, in summer, maintains a high temperature even during the night. 
We may hence conclude that when a sandy soil is stripped of wood, the 
local temperature will be raised. After the sands follow successively ar¬ 
gillaceous, arable, and garden ground, then humus, which occupies the 
lowest rank. If we represent the power of calcareous sand to retain 
heat by 100, we have, according to Schubler, 


For [silicious ?] sand. 95.6 

“ arable calcareous soil. 74.3 

“ argillaceous earth. 68.4 

“ garden earth. 64.8 

“ humus. 49 .O 


“ The retentive power of humus, then, is but half as great as that of 
calcareous sand. We will add that the power of retaining heat is propor¬ 
tional to the density. It has also a relation to the magnitude of the par¬ 
ticles. It is for this reason that ground covered with silicious pebbles 
cools more slowly than silicious sand, and that pebbly soils are best suited 
to the cultivation of the vine, because they advance the ripening of the 
grape more rapidly than chalky and clayey earths, which cool quickly. 







ABSORBING AND EMITTING SURFACE. 


145 


An acre of chalk, rolled hard and smooth, would have great 
reflecting power, bnt its radiation would be much increased by 
breaking it np into clods, because the actually exposed surface 
would be greater, though the outline of the field remained the 
same. The area of a triangle being equal to its base multi¬ 
plied by half the length of a perpendicular let fall from its 
apex, it follows that the entire superficies of the triangular 
faces of a quadrangular pyramid, the perpendicular of whose 
sides should be twice the length of the base, would be four 
times the area of the ground it covered, and would add to the 
field on which it stood so much surface capable of receiving 
and emitting heat, though, in consequence of obliquity and 
direction of plane, its actual absorption and emission of heat 
might not be so great as that of an additional quantity of level 
ground containing four times the area of its base. The lesser 
inequalities which always occur in the surface of ordinary 
earth affect in the same way its quantity of superficies acting 
upon the temperature of the atmosphere, and acted on by it, 
though the amount of this action and reaction is not suscep¬ 
tible of measurement. 

Analogous effects are produced by other objects, of what¬ 
ever form or character, standing or lying upon the earth, and 
no solid can be placed upon a flat piece of ground, without 
itself exposing a greater surface than it covers. This applies, 
of course, to forest trees and their leaves, and indeed to all 
vegetables, as well as to other prominent bodies. If we sujd- 
pose forty trees to be planted on an acre, one being situated in 
the centre of every square of two rods the side, and to grow 
until their branches and leaves everywhere meet, it is evident 
that, when in full foliage, the trunks, branches, and leaves 
would present an amount of thermoscopic surface much 
greater than that of an acre of bare earth ; and besides this, 
the fallen trees lying scattered on the ground, would some- 

Hence we see that in examining the calorific effects of clearing forests, it 
is important to take into account the properties of the soil laid bare. 
Beoquerel, Dee Climate et dee Sole boisee , p. 137. 

10 


146 


FORM OF LEAVES IMPORTANT. 


what augment the sum total.* On the other hand, the grow¬ 
ing leaves of trees generally form a succession of stages, or, 
loosely speaking, layers, corresponding to the annual growth 
of the branches, and more or less overlying each other. This 
disposition of the foliage interferes with that free communica¬ 
tion between sun and sky above, and leaf surface below, on 
which the amount of radiation and absorption of heat depends. 
From all these considerations, it appears that though the 
effective thermoscopic surface of a forest in full leaf does not 
exceed that of bare ground in the same proportion as does its 
measured superficies, yet the actual quantity of area capable 
of receiving and emitting heat must be greater in the former 
than in the latter case.f 

It must further be remembered that the form and texture 
of a given surface are important elements in determining its 
thermoscopic character. Leaves are porous, and admit air 
and light more or less freely into their substance; they are 
generally smooth and even glazed on one surface; they are 
usually covered on one or both sides with spiculse, and they 
very commonly present one or more acuminated points in their 
outline—all circumstances which tend to augment their power 
of emitting heat by reflection or radiation. Direct experiment 
on growing trees is very difficult, nor is it in any case prac¬ 
ticable to distinguish how far a reduction of temperature pro¬ 
duced by vegetation is due to radiation, and how far to exha¬ 
lation of the fluids of the plant in a gaseous form; for both 
processes usually go on together. But the frigorific effect of 
leafy structure is well observed in the deposit of dew and the 
occurrence of hoarfrost on the foliage of grasses, and other 
small vegetables, and on other objects of similar form and con- 

* “ The Washington elm at Cambridge—a tree of no extraordinary 
size—was some years ago estimated to produce a crop of seven millions of 
leaves, exposing a surface of two hundred thousand square feet, or about 
five acres of foliage.”— Gkay, First Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physi¬ 
ology, as quoted by Coultas, What may be learned from a Tree , p. 34. 

t See, on this particular point, and on the general influence of the 
forest on temperature, Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur , i, 158. 


THE FOREST IN SUMMER AND WINTER. 


147 


sistence, when the temperature of the air a few yards above 
has not been brought down to the dew point, still less to 32°, 
the degree of cold required to congeal dew to frost.* 

b. Trees as Conductors of Heat. 

We are also to take into account the action of the forest as 
a conductor of heat between the atmosphere and the earth. 
In the most important countries of America and Europe, and 
especially in those which have suffered most from the destruc¬ 
tion of the woods, the superficial strata of the earth are colder 
in winter, and warmer in summer than those a few inches 
lower, and their shifting temperature approximates to the 
atmospheric mean of the respective seasons. The roots of 
large trees penetrate beneath the superficial strata, and reach 
earth of a nearly constant temperature, corresponding to the 
mean for the entire year. As conductors, they convey the 
heat of the atmosphere to the earth when the earth is colder 
than the air, and transmit it in the contrary direction when 
the temperature of the earth is higher than that of the atmo¬ 
sphere. Of course, then, as conductors, they tend to equalize 
the temperature of the earth and the air. 

c. Trees in Summer and Winter. 

In countries where the questions I am considering have 
the greatest practical importance, a very large proportion, if 
not a majority, of the trees are of deciduous foliage, and their 
radiating as well as their shading surface is very much greater 
in summer than in winter. In the latter season, they little 
obstruct the reception of heat by the ground or the radiation 
from it; whereas, in the former, they often interpose a complete 

* The radiating and refrigerating power of objects by no means depends 
on their form alone. Melloni cut sheets of metal into the shape of leaves 
and grasses, and found that they produced little cooling effect, and w ere 
not moistened under atmospheric conditions which determined a plentiful 
deposit of dew on the leaves of vegetables. 


148 


DEAD PRODUCTS OF TREES—SOIL OF FOREST. 


canopy between the ground and the shy, and materially inter¬ 
fere with both processes. 

d. Dead Products of Trees. 

Besides this various action of standing trees considered as 
inorganic matter, the forest exercises, by the annual moulting 
of its foliage, still another influence on the temperature of the 
earth, and, consequently, of the atmosphere which rests upon 
it. If you examine the constitution of the superficial soil in a 
primitive or an old and undisturbed artificially planted wood, 
you find, first, a deposit of undecayed leaves, twigs, and seeds, 
lying in loose layers on the surface ; then, more compact beds 
of the same materials in incipient, and, as you descend, more 
and more advanced stages of decomposition ; then, a mass of 
black mould, in which traces of organic structure are hardly 
discoverable except by microscopic examination; then, a 
stratum of mineral soil, more or less mixed with vegetable 
matter carried down into it by water, or resulting from the 
decay of roots ; and, finally, the inorganic earth or rock itself. 
Without this deposit of the dead products of trees, this latter 
would be the superficial stratum, and as its powers of absorp¬ 
tion, radiation, and conduction of heat would differ essentially 
from those of the layers with which it has been covered by the 
droppings of the forest, it would act upon the temperature of 
the atmosphere, and be acted on by it, in a very different way 
from the leaves and mould which rest upon it. Leaves, still 
entire, or partially decayed, are very indifferent conductors of 
heat, and, therefore, though they diminish the warming influ¬ 
ence of the summer sun on the soil below them, they, on the 
other hand, prevent the escape of heat from that soil in win¬ 
ter, and, consequently, in cold climates, even when the ground 
is not covered by a protecting mantle of snow, the earth does 
not freeze to as great a depth in the wood as in the open field. 


TREES AS A SHELTER. 


149 


e. Trees as a Shelter to Ground to the Leeward. 

The action of the forest, considered merely as a mechanical 
shelter to grounds lying to the leeward of it, would seem to be 
an influence of too restricted a character to deserve much 
notice ; but many facts concur to show that it is an important 
element in local climate, and that it is often a valuable means 
of defence against the spread of miasmatic effluvia, though, in 
this last case, it may exercise a chemical as well as a mechan¬ 
ical agency. In the report of a committee appointed in 1836 
to examine an article of the forest code of France, Arasro 
observes : “ If a curtain of forest, on the coasts of Normandy 
and of Brittany were destroyed, these two provinces would 
become accessible to the winds from the west, to the mild 
breezes of the sea. Hence a decrease of the cold of winter. 
If a similar forest were to be cleared on the eastern border 
of France, the glacial east wind would prevail with greater 
strength, and the winters would become more severe. Thus 
the removal of a belt of wood would produce opposite effects 
in the two regions.” * 

This opinion receives confirmation from an observation of 
Dr. Dwight, who remarks, in reference to the woods of New 
England : “ Another effect of removing the forest will be the 
free passage of the winds, and among them of the southern 
winds, over the surface. This, I think, has been an increasing 
fact within my own remembrance. As the cultivation of the 
country has extended farther to the north, the winds from the 
south have reached distances more remote from the ocean, and 
imparted their warmth frequently, and in such degrees as, 
forty years since, were in the same places very little known. 
This fact, also, contributes to lengthen the summer, and to 
shorten the winter-half of the year.” f 

It is thought in Italy that the clearing of the Apennines 
has very materially affected the climate of the valley of the 
Fo. It is asserted in Le Alpi che cingono ITtalia that: In 

* Beoquerel, Des Climate, etc., Discours Prelim, vi. t Travels , i, p. 61. 


150 


THE FOREST AS A SHELTER. 


consequence of the felling of the woods on the Apennines, the 
sirocco prevails greatly on the right hank of the Po, in the 
Parmesan territory, and in a part of Lombardy ; it injures the 
harvests and the vineyards, and sometimes ruins the crops of 
the season. To the same cause many ascribe the meteoro¬ 
logical changes in the precincts of Modena and of Peggio. In 
the communes of these districts, where formerly straw roofs 
resisted the force of the winds, tiles are now hardly sufficient; 
in others, where tiles answered for roofs, large slabs of stone 
are now ineffectual; and in many neighboring communes the 
grapes and the grain are swept off by the blasts of the south 
and southwest winds. 

On the other hand, according to the same authority, the 
pinery of Porto, near Kavenna—which is 33 kilometres long, 
and is one of the oldest pine woods in Italy—having been 
replanted with resinous trees after it was unfortunately cut, 
has relieved the city from the sirocco to which it had become 
exposed, and in a great degree restored its ancient climate.* 

The felling of the woods on the Atlantic coast of Jutland 
has exposed the soil not only to drifting sands, but to sharp 
sea winds, that have exerted a sensible deteriorating effect on 
the climate of that peninsula, which has no mountains to serve 
at once as a barrier to the force of the winds, and as a store¬ 
house of moisture received by precipitation or condensed from 
atmospheric vapors.f 

It is evident that the effect of the forest, as a mechanical 
impediment to the passage of the wind, would extend to a very 
considerable distance above its own height, and hence protect 
while standing, or lay open when felled, a much larger surface 
than might at first thought be supposed. The atmosphere, 
movable as are its particles, and light and elastic as are its 
masses, is nevertheless held together as a continuous whole by 
the law of attraction between its atoms, and, therefore, an ob¬ 
struction which mechanically impedes the movement of a given 


* Le Alpi die cingono VItalia, pp. 370, 371. 
t Bergsoe, Reventlovs Virlcsomhed, ii, p. 125. 


THE FOREST AS A SHELTER. 


151 


stratum of air, will retard the passage of the strata above and 
below it. To this effect may often be added that of an ascend¬ 
ing current from the forest itself, w T hich must always exist 
when the atmosphere within the wood is warmer than the 
stratum of air above it, and must be of almost constant occur¬ 
rence in the case of cold winds, from whatever quarter, because 
the still air in the forest is slow in taking up the temperature 
of the moving columns and currents around and above it. 
Experience, in fact, has shown that mere rows of trees, and 
even much lower obstructions, are of essential service in de¬ 
fending vegetation against the action of the wind. Hardy 
proposes planting, in Algeria, belts of trees at the distance of 
one hundred metres from each other, as a shelter which expe¬ 
rience had proved to be useful in France.* “ In the valley of 
the Rhone,” says Becquerel, “ a simple hedge, two metres in 
height, is a sufficient protection for a distance of twenty-two 
metres.” f The mechanical shelter acts, no doubt, chiefly as 
a defence against the mechanical force of the wind, but its uses 
are by no means limited to this effect. If the currrent of air 
which it resists moves horizontally, it would prevent the access 
of cold or parching blasts to the ground for a great distance; 
and did the wind even descend at a large angle with the sur¬ 
face, still a considerable extent of ground would be protected 
by a forest to the windward of it. If we suppose the trees of 
a wood to have a mean height of only twenty yards, they 
would often beneficially affect the temperature or the moisture 
of a belt of land two or three hundred yards in width, and thus 
perhaps rescue valuable crops from destruction.^: 

* Becquerel, Des Glimats , etc., p. 179. t Ibid., p. 116. 

J The following well-attested instance of a local change of climate is 
probably to be referred to the influence of the forest as a shelter against 
cold winds. To supply the extraordinary demand for Italian iron occa¬ 
sioned by the exclusion of English iron in the time of Napoleon I, the 
furnaces of the valleys of Bergamo were stimulated to great activity. 
“ The ordinary production of charcoal not sufficing to feed the furnaces 
and the forges, the woods were felled, the copses cut before their time, and 
the whole economy of the forest was deranged. At Piazzatorre there was 


152 


RETARDATION OF SPRING. 


The local retardation of spring so mncli complained of in 
Italy, France, and Switzerland, and the increased frequency of 
late frosts at that season, appear to be ascribable to the admis¬ 
sion of cold blasts to the surface, by the felling of the forests 
which formerly both screened it as by a wall, and communi¬ 
cated the warmth of their soil to the air and earth to the 
leeward. Caimi states that since the cutting down of the 
woods of the Apennines, the cold winds destroy or stunt the 
vegetation, and that, in consequence of u the usurpation of 
winter on the domain of spring,” the district of Mugello has 
lost all its mulberries, except the few which find in the lee of 
buildings a protection like that once furnished by the forest.* 
u It is proved,” says Clave, “ Etudes,” p. 44, that the de¬ 
partment of Ardeche, which now contains not a single consid¬ 
erable wood, has experienced within thirty years a climatic 
disturbance, of which the late frosts, formerly unknown in the 
country, are one of the most melancholy effects. Similar 
results have been observed in the plain of Alsace, in conse¬ 
quence of the denudation of several of the crests of the 
Yosges.” 

such a devastation of the woods, and consequently such an increased 
severity of climate, that maize no longer ripened. An association, formed 
for the purpose, effected the restoration of the forest, and maize flourishes 
again in the fields of Piazzatorre.”—Report by G. Rosa, in II Politecnico , 
Dicembre, 1861, p. 614. 

Similar ameliorations have been produced by plantations in Belgium. 
In an interesting series of articles by Baude, entitled “ Les Cotes de la 
Manche,” in the Revue des Deux Mondes , I find this statement: “ A spec¬ 
tator placed on the famous bell tower of the cathedral of Antwerp, saw, 
not long since, on the opposite side of the Schelde only a vast desert plain; 
now he sees a forest, the limits of which are confounded with the horizon. 
Let him enter within its shade. The supposed forest is but a system of 
regular rows of trees, the oldest of which is not forty years of age. These 
plantations have ameliorated the climate which had doomed to sterility the 
soil where they are planted. While the tempest is violently agitating their 
tops, the air a little below is still, and sands far more barren than the 
plateau of La Ilague have been transformed, under their protection, into 
fertile fields.”— Revue des Deux Mondes , January, 1859, p. 277. 

* Cenni sulla Importanza e Coltura dei Boschi , p. 81. 


THE MISTRAL IN FRANCE-DETERIORATION OF CLIMATE. 153 

Dussard, as quoted by Bibbe,* maintains that even the 
mistral , or northwest wind, whose chilling blasts are so fatal 
to tender vegetation in the spring, “ is the child of man, the 
result of his devastations.” “ Under the reign of Augustus,” 
continues he, “ the forests which protected the Cevennes were 
felled, or destroyed by fire, in mass. A vast country, before 
covered with impenetrable woods—powerful obstacles to the 
movement and even to the formation of hurricanes—was sud¬ 
denly denuded, swept bare, stripped, and soon after, a scourge 
hitherto unknown struck terror over the land from Avignon 
to the Bouches du Bhone, thence to Marseilles, and then ex¬ 
tended its ravages, diminished indeed by a long career which 
had partially exhausted its force, over the whole maritime 
frontier. The people thought this wind a curse sent of God. 
They raised altars to it and offered sacrifices to appease its 
rage.” It seems, however, that this plague was less destruc¬ 
tive than at present, until the close of the sixteenth century, 
when further clearings had removed most of the remaining 
barriers to its course. Up to that time, the northwest wind 
appears not to have attained to the maximum of specific effect 
which now characterizes it as a local phenomenon. Extensive 
districts, from which the rigor of the seasons has now banished 
valuable crops, were not then exposed to the loss of their har¬ 
vests by tempests, cold, or drought. The deterioration was 
rapid in its progress. Under the Consulate, the clearings had 
exerted so injurious an effect upon the climate, that the culti¬ 
vation of the olive had retreated several leagues, and since the 
winters and springs of 1820 and 1836, this branch of rural 
industry has been abandoned in a great number of localities 
where it was advantageously pursued before. The orange now 
flourishes only at a few sheltered points of the coast, and it is 
threatened even at Hyeres, where the clearing of the hills near 
the town has proved very prejudicial to this valuable tree. 

Marschand informs us that, since the felling of the woods, 
late spring frosts are more frequent in many localities north 


* La Provence au point cle vue de« Torrents el dcs Inondations ) p. 19. 


154 


PROTECTION AGAINST MALARIA. 


of the Alps ; that fruit trees thrive well no longer, and that i* 
is difficult to raise young trees.* 

f. Trees as a Protection against Malaria . 

The influence of forests in preventing the diffusion of mias¬ 
matic vapors is a matter of less familiar observation, and per¬ 
haps does not come strictly within the sphere of the present 
inquiry, hut its importance will justify me in devoting some 
space to the subject. “ It has been observed ” (I quote again 
from Becquerel) u that humid air, charged with miasmata, is 
deprived of them in passing through the forest. Rigaud de 
Lille observed localities in Italy where the interposition of a 
screen of trees preserved everything beyond it, while the 
unprotected grounds were subject to fevers.” f Few European 
countries present better opportunities for observation on this 
point than Italy, because in that kingdom the localities ex¬ 
posed to miasmatic exhalations are numerous, and belts of 
trees, if not forests, are of so frequent occurrence that their 
efficacy in this respect can be easily tested. The belief that 
rows of trees afford an important protection against malarious 
influences is very general among Italians best qualified by 
intelligence and professional experience to judge upon the 
subject. The commissioners appointed to report on the meas¬ 
ures to be adopted for the improvement of the Tuscan Ma- 
remme advised the planting of three or four rows of poplars, 
Populus aZba, in such directions as to obstruct the currents of 
air from malarious localities, and thus intercept a great pro¬ 
portion of the pernicious exhalations.” % Lieutenant Maury 
even believed that a few rows of sunflowers, planted between the 
Washington Observatory and the marshy banks of the Poto¬ 
mac, had saved the inmates of that establishment from the 
intermittent fevers to which they had been formerly liable. 

* JJeber die Entwaldung der Gebirge , p. 28. 

t Becquekel, Des Climats, etc., p. 9. 

X Salvagnoli, Rapporto sul Bonijkamento delle Maremme Toscane, pp. 
xli, 124. 


PROTECTION AGAINST MALARIA. 


155 


Maury’s experiments have been repeated in Italy. Large 
plantations of sunflowers have been made upon the alluvial 
deposits of the Oglio, above its entrance into the Lake of Iseo 
near Pisogne, and it is said with favorable results to the health 
of the neighborhood.* In fact, the generally beneficial effects 
of a forest wall or other vegetable screen, as a protection against 
noxious exhalations from marshes or other sources of disease 
situated to the windward of them, are very commonly admitted. 

It is argued that, in these cases, the foliage of trees and of 
other vegetables exercises a chemical as well as a mechanical 
effect upon the atmosphere, and some, who allow that forests 
may intercept the circulation of the miasmatic effluvia of 
swampy soils, or even render them harmless by decomposing 
them, contend, nevertheless, that they are themselves active 
causes of the production of malaria. The subject has been a 
good deal discussed in Italy, and there is some reason to think 
that under special circumstances the influence of the forest in 
this respect may be prejudicial rather than salutary, though 
this does not appear to be generally the case.f It is, at all 
events, well known that the great swamps of Virginia and the 
Carol in as, in climates nearly similar to that of Italy, are healthy 
even to the white man, so long as the forests in and around 
them remain, but become very insalubrious when the woods 
are felled.:): 

The Forest , as Inorganic Matter , tends to mitigate Extremes. 

The surface which trees and leaves present augments the 
general superficies of the earth exposed to the absorption of 

* II Politecnico , Milano, Aprile e Maggio, 1863, p. 35. 

f Salvagnoli, Memorie suite Maremme Toscane , pp. 213, 214. 

I Except in the seething marshes of the tropics, where vegetable decay 
is extremely rapid, the uniformity of temperature and of atmospheric hu¬ 
midity renders all forests eminently healthful. See IIohenstein’s obser¬ 
vations on this subject, Per Wald , p. 41. 

There is no question that open squares and parks conduce to the salu¬ 
brity of cities, and many observers are of opinion that the trees and other 
vegetables with which such grounds are planted contribute essentially to 
their beneficial influence. See an article in Au% dcr Natur , xxii, p. 813. 


156 


SPECIFIC TEMPERATURE OF TREES. 


heat, and increases the radiating and reflecting area in the 
same proportion. It is impossible to measure the relative 
value of these two elements—increase of absorbing and in¬ 
crease of emitting surface—as tliermometrical influences, 
because they exert themselves under infinitely varied condi¬ 
tions ; and it is equally impossible to make a quantitative esti¬ 
mate of any partial, still more of the total effect of the forest, 
considered as dead matter, on the temperature of the atmos¬ 
phere, and of the portion of the earth’s surface acted on by it. 
But it seems probable that its greatest influence in this respect 
is due to its character of a screen, or mechanical obstacle to 
the transmission of heat between the earth and the air; and 
this is equally true of the standing tree and of the dead 
foliage which it deposits in successive layers at its foot. 

The complicated action of trees and their products, as dead 
absorbents, radiators, reflectors, and conductors of heat, and as 
intercepters of its transmission, is so intimately connected with 
their effects upon the humidity of the air and the earth, and 
with all their living processes, that it is difficult to separate 
the former from the latter class of influences; but upon the 
whole, the forest must thus far be regarded as tending to miti¬ 
gate extremes, and, therefore, as an equalizer of temperature. 

TREES AS ORGANISMS. 

Specific Ileat. 

Trees, considered as organisms, produce in themselves, or 
in the air, a certain amount of heat, by absorbing and con¬ 
densing atmospheric vapor, and they exert an opposite influ¬ 
ence by absorbing water and exhaling it in the form of vapor ; 
but there is still another mode by which their living processes 
may warm the air around them, independently of the ther¬ 
mometric effects of condensation and evaporation. The vital 
heat of a dozen persons raises the temperature of a room. If 
trees possess a specific temperature of their own, an organic 
power of generating heat, like that with which the warm¬ 
blooded animals are gifted, though by a different process, a 


SPECIFIC! TEMPERATURE OF TREES. 


157 


certain amount of weight is to be ascribed to this element, in 
estimating tlie action of the forest upon atmospheric temper¬ 
ature. 

“ Observation shows,” says Meguscher, “ that the wood of 
a living tree maintains a temperature of + 12° or 13° Cent. 
[= 54°, 56° Fahr.] when the temperature of the air stands at 
3°, 7°, and 8° [= 37°, 46°, 47° F.] above zero, and that the 
internal warmth of the tree does not rise and fall in proportion 
to that of the atmosphere. So long as the latter is below 18° 
[= 67° Fahr.], that of the tree is always the highest; hut if the 
temperature of the air rises to 18°, that of the vegetable growth 
is the lowest. Since, then, trees maintain at all seasons a con¬ 
stant mean temperature of 12° [= 54° Fahr.], it is easy to see 
why the air in contact with the forest must be warmer in win¬ 
ter, cooler in summer, than in situations where it is deprived 
of that influence.” * 

Boussingault remarks: “ In many flowers there has been 
observed a very considerable evolution of heat, at the approach 
of fecundation. In certain arums the temperature rises to 40° 
or 50° Cent. [= 104° or 122° Fahr.]. It is very probable that 
this phenomenon is general, and varies only in the intensity 
with which it is manifested.” f 

If we suppose the fecundation of the flowers of forest trees 
to be attended with a tenth only of this calorific power, they 
could not fail to exert an important influence on the warmth 
of the atmospheric strata in contact with them. 

In a paper on Meteorology by Professor Henry, published 
in the United States Patent Office Report for 1857, p. 504, 
that distinguished physicist observes: “ As a general deduc¬ 
tion from chemical and mechanical principles, we think no 
change of temperature is ever produced where the actions 
belonging to one. or both of these principles are not present. 
Hence, in midwinter, when all vegetable functions are dor¬ 
mant, we do not believe that any heat is developed by a tree, 
or that its interior differs in temperature from its exterior 

* Memoria mi JBoschi di Lombardia, p. 45. t Economic Rurale, i, p. 22. 


158 


SPECIFIC TEMPERATURE OF TREES. 


further than it is protected from the external air. The 
experiments which have been made on this point, we think, 
have been directed by a false analogy. During the active 
circulation of the sap and the production of new tissue, 
variations of temperature belonging exclusively to the plant 
may be observed; but it is inconsistent with general prin¬ 
ciples that heat should be generated where no change is 
taking place.” 

There can be no doubt that moisture is given out by trees 
and evaporated in extremely cold winter-weather, and unless 
new fluid were supplied from the roots, the tree would be 
exhausted of its juices before winter was over. But this is not 
observed to be the fact, and, though the point is disputed, 
respectable authorities declare that u wood felled in the depth 
of winter is the heaviest and fullest of sap.” * Warm weather 
in winter, of too short continuance to affect the temperature 
of the ground sensibly, stimulates a free flow of sap in the 
maple. Thus, in the last week of December, 1862, and the 
first week of January, 1863, sugar was made from that tree, in 
various parts of New England. £< A single branch of a tree, 
admitted into a warm room in winter through an aperture in 
a window, opened its buds and developed its leaves while the 
rest of the tree in the external air remained in its winter 
sleep.” f The roots of forest trees in temperate climates, 
remain, for the most part, in a moist soil, of a temperature not 
much below the annual mean, through the whole winter ; and 
we cannot account for the uninterrupted moisture of the tree, 
unless we suppose that the roots furnish a constant supply of 
water. 

Atkinson describes a ravine in a valley in Siberia, which 
was filled with ice to the depth of twenty-five feet. Poplars 
were growing in this ice, which was thawed to the distance of 
some inches from the stem. But the surface of the soil beneath 
it must have remained still frozen, for the holes around the 
trees were full of water resulting from its melting, and this 


* Rossmassler, Der Wald , p. 158. 


t Ibid., p. 160. 


TOTAL INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST. 


159 


would have escaped below if the ground had been thawed. In 
this case, although the roots had not thawed the thick covering 
of earth above them, the trunks must have melted the ice in 
contact with them. The trees, when observed by Atkinson, 
were in full leaf, but it does not appear at what period the ice 
around their stems had melted. 

From these facts, and others of the like sort, it would seem 
that “ all vegetable functions are ” not absolutely “ dormant ” 
in winter, and, therefore, that trees may give out some heat at 
that season. But, however this may be, the “ circulation of 
the sap ” commences at a very early period in the spring, and 
the temperature of the air in contact with trees may then be 
sufficiently affected by heat evolved in the vital processes of 
vegetation, to raise the thermometric mean of wooded coun¬ 
tries for that season, and, of course, for the year.* 

Total Influence of the Forest on Temperature. 

It has not yet been found practicable to measure, sum up, 
and equate the total influence of the forest, its processes and its 
products, dead and living, upon temperature, and investigators 
differ much in their conclusions on this subject. It seems 

* The low temperature of air and soil at which, in the frigid zone, as 
well as in warmer latitudes under special circumstances, the processes of 
vegetation go on, seems to necessitate the supposition that all the manifes¬ 
tations of vegetable life are attended with an evolution of heat. In the 
United States, it is common to protect ice, in icehouses, by a covering of 
straw, which naturally sometimes contains kernels of grain. These often 
sprout, and even throw out roots and leaves to a considerable length, in a 
temperature very little above the freezing point. Three or four years since, 
I saw a lump of very clear and apparently solid ice, about eight inches long 
by six thick, on which a kernel of grain had sprouted in an icehouse, and 
sent half a dozen or more very slender roots into the pores of the ice and 
through the whole length of the lump. The young plant must have thrown 
out a considerable quantity of heat; for though the ice was, as I have said, 
otherwise solid, the pores through which the roots passed were enlarged to 
perhaps double the diameter of the fibres, but still not so much as to pre¬ 
vent the retention of water in them by capillary attraction. 


160 


TOTAL INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST. 


probable tliat in every particular case the result is, if not deter¬ 
mined, at least so much modified by local conditions which are 
infinitely varied, that no general formula is applicable to the 
question. 

In the report to which I referred on page 149, Gay-Lussac 
says : “ In my opinion we have not yet any positive proof that 
the forest has, in itself, any real influence on the climate of a 
great country, or of a particular locality. By closely examin¬ 
ing the effects of clearing off the woods, we should perhaps 
find that, far from being an evil, it is an advantage ; but these 
questions are so complicated when they are examined in a 
climatological point of view, that the solution of them is very 
difficult, not to say impossible/’ 

Becquerel, on the other hand, considers it certain that in 
tropical climates, the destruction of the forests is accompanied 
with an elevation of the mean temperature, and he thinks it 
highly probable that it has the same effect in the temperate 
zones. The following is the substance of his remarks on this 
subject:—• 

“ Forests act as frigorific causes in three ways : 

“ 1. They shelter the ground against solar irradiation and 
maintain a greater humidity. 

“ 2. They produce a cutaneous transpiration by the leaves. 

“ 3. They multiply, by the expansion of their branches, the 
surfaces which are cooled by radiation. 

“ These three causes acting with greater or less force, we 
must, in the study of the climatology of a country, take into 
account the proportion between the area of the forests and the 
surface which is bared of trees and covered with herbs and 
grasses. 

“We should be inclined to believe d priori, according to 
the foregoing considerations, that the clearing of the woods, 
by raising the temperature and increasing the dryness of the 
air, ought to react on climate. There is no doubt that, if the 
vast desert of the Sahara were to become wooded in the course 
of ages, the sands would cease to be heated as much as at the 
present epoch, when the mean temperature is twenty-nine 


TOTAL INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST. 


161 


degrees [centigrade, = 85° Fahr.]. In that case, the ascend¬ 
ing currents of warm air would cease, or be less warm, and 
would not contribute, by descending in our latitudes, to soften 
the climate of Western Europe. Thus the clearing of a great 
country may react on the climates of regions more or less 
remote from it. 

“ The observations by Boussingault leave no doubt on this 
point. This writer determined the mean temperature of 
wooded and of cleared points, under the same latitude, and at 
the same elevation above the sea, in localities comprised be¬ 
tween the eleventh degree of north and the fifth degree of 
south latitude, that is to say, in the portion of the tropics 
nearest to the equator, and where radiation tends powerfully 
during the night to lower the temperature under a sky with¬ 
out clouds.” * 

The result of these observations, which has been pretty 
generally adopted by physicists, is that the mean temperature 
of cleared land in the tropics appears to be about one degree 
centigrade, or a little less than two degrees of Fahrenheit, 
above that of the forest. On page 147 of the volume just 
cited, Becquerel argues that, inasmuch as the same and some¬ 
times a greater difference is found in favor of the open ground, 
at points within the tropics so elevated as to have a temperate 
or even a polar climate, we must conclude that the forests in 
Northern America exert a refrigerating influence equally pow¬ 
erful. But the conditions of the soil are so different in the two 
regions compared, that I think we cannot, with entire con¬ 
fidence, reason from the one to the other, and it is much to be 
desired that observations be made*on the summer and winter 
temperature of both the air and the ground in the depths of 
the North American forests, before it is too late.f 


* Becquerel, Des Climate , etc., pp. 139—141. 

t Dr. Williams made some observations on this subject in 1789, and in 
1791, but they generally belonged to the warmer months, and I do not 
know that any extensive series of comparisons between the temperature of 
the ground in the woods and the fields has been attempted in America. 

11 


162 


INFLUENCE OF FOREST ON HUMIDITY. 


INFLUENCE OF FORESTS ON THE HUMIDITY OF THE AIR AND 

THE EARTH. 

a. As Inorganic Matter. 

The most important influence of the forest on climate is, 
no doubt, that which it exercises on the humidity of the air 
and the earth, and this climatic action it exerts partly as dead, 
partly as living matter. By its interposition as a curtain be¬ 
tween the sky and the ground, it intercepts a large proportion 
of the dew and the lighter showers, which would otherwise 

Dr. Williams’s thermometer was sunk to the depth of ten inches, and gave 
the following results: 


Time. 

Temperature 
of ground in 
pasture. 

Temperature 
of ground in 
woods. 

Difference. 

May 

23. 

62 

46 

6 

U 

28. 

57 

48 

9 

June 

16. 

64 

61 

13 

U 

27. 

62 

51 

11 

July 

16. 

62 

61 

11 

4i 

30. 

65£ 

55£ 

10 

Aug. 

15. 

68 

68 

10 

u 

31. 

59i 

65 

H 

Sept. 

15. 

69£ 

65 

H 

Oct. 

1. 

69£ 

55 

H 

U 

15. 

49 

49 

0 

Nov. 

1. 

43 

43 

0 

u 

16. 

43£ 

43£ 

0 


On the 14th of January, 1791, in a winter remarkable for its extreme 
severity, he found the ground, on a plain open field where the snow had 
been blown away, frozen to the depth of three feet and five inches; in 
the woods where the snow was three feet deep, and where the soil had 
frozen to the depth of six inches before the snow fell, the thermometer, 
at six inches below the surface of the ground, stood at 39°. In consequence 
of the covering of the snow, therefore, the previously frozen ground had 
been thawed and raised to seven degrees above the freezing point.— Wil¬ 
liams’s Vermont , i, p. 74. 

Bodies of fresh water, so large as not to be sensibly affected by local 
influences of narrow reach or short duration, would afford climatic indi¬ 
cations well worthy of special observation. Lake Champlain, which forms 
the boundary between the States of New York and Vermont, presents very 
favorable conditions for this purpose. This lake, which drains a basin of 
about 6,000 square miles, covers an area, excluding its islands, of about 500 























INFLUENCE OF FOREST ON HUMIDITY. 


103 


moisten the surface of the soil, and restores it to the atmos¬ 
phere by evaporation; while in heavier rains, the large drops 
which fall upon the leaves and branches are broken into 
smaller ones, and consequently strike the ground with less 
mechanical force, or are perhaps even dispersed into vapor 
without reaching it.* As a screen, it prevents the access of 

square miles. It extends from lat. 43° 30' to 45° 20', in very nearly a 
meridian line, has a mean width of four and a half miles, with an extreme 
breadth, excluding hays almost land-locked, of thirteen miles. Its mean 
depth is not well known. It is, however, 400 feet deep in some places, 
and from 100 to 200 in many, and has few shoals or flats. The climate 
is of such severity that it rarely fails to freeze completely over, and to he 
safely crossed upon the ice, with heavy teams, for several weeks every 
winter. Thompson ( Vermont , p. 14, and Appendix, p. 9) gives the follow¬ 
ing table of the times of the complete closing and opening of the ice, 
opposite Burlington, about the centre of the lake, and where it is ten 
miles wide. 


Year. 

Closing. 

Opening. 

Days 

closed. 

Year. 

Closing. 

Opening. 

Days 

closed. 

1816 

February 9 



1836 

January 27 

April 21 

85 

1817 

January 29 

April 16 

78 

1837 

January 15 

April 26 

101 

1818 

February 2 

April 15 

72 

1838 

February 2 

April 13 

70 

1819 

March 4 

April 17 

44 

1839 

January 25 

April 6 

71 

i con 

1 February 3 

February 

l 4 

1840 

January 25 

February 20 

26 


j March 8 

March 12 

f 4 

1S41 

February 18 

April 19 

61 

1821 

January 15 

April 21 

95 

1842 

not closed 



1 S 22 

January 24 

March 30 

75 

1843 

February 16 

April 22 

65 

1823 

February 7 

April 5 

57 

1844 

January 25 

April 11 

77 

1824 

January 22 

February 11 

20 

1845 

February 8 

March 26 

51 

1825 

February 9 



1846 

February 10 

March 26 

44 

1826 

February 1 

March 24 

51 

1847 

February 15 

April 23 

68 

1827 

January 21 

March 31 

68 

1848 

February 13 

February 26 

13 

1828 

not closed 



1849 

February 7 

March 23 

44 

1829 

January 31 

April 


1S50 

not closed 



1832 

February 6 

April 17 

70 

1851 

February 1 

March 12 

39 

1833 

February 2 

April 6 

63 

1852 

January 18 

April 19 

92 

1834 

February 13 

February 20 

7 





1QQK 

| January 10 

January 23 

13 






j February 7 

April 12 

64 






In 1847, although, at the point indicated, the ice broke up on the 23d 
of April, it remained frozen much later at the North, and steamers were 
not able to traverse the whole length of the lake until May 6th. 

* We are not, indeed, to suppose that condensation of vapor and 
evaporation of water are going on in the same stratum of air at the same 
time, or, in other words, that vapor is condensed into raindrops, and rain¬ 
drops evaporated, under the same conditions; hut rain formed in one 
stratum, may fall through another, where vapor would not be condensed. 
Two saturated strata of different temperatures may be brought into con- 






















164 


INFLUENCE OF FOREST ON HUMIDITY. 


the sun’s rays to the earth, and, of course, an elevation of tem¬ 
perature which would occasion a great increase of evapora¬ 
tion. As a mechanical obstruction, it impedes the passage of 
air currents over the ground, which, as is well known, is one 
of the most efficient agents in promoting evaporation and the 
refrigeration resulting from it.* In the forest, the air is almost 
quiescent, and moves only as local changes of temperature 
affect the specific gravity of its particles. Hence there is often 
a dead calm in the woods when a furious blast is raging in the 
open country at a few yards’ distance. The denser the forest 
—as for example, where it consists of spike-leaved trees, or is 
thickly intermixed with them—the more obvious is its effect, 
and no one can have passed from the field to the wood in cold, 
windy weather, without having remarked it.f 

tact in the higher regions, and discharge large raindrops, which, if not 
divided by some obstruction, will reach the ground, though passing all 
the time through strata which would vaporize them if they were in a state 
of more minute division. 

* It is perhaps too much to say that the influence of trees upon the 
wind is strictly limited to the mechanical resistance of their trunks, 
branches, and foliage. So far as the forest, by dead or by living action, 
raises or lowers the temperature of the air within it, so far it creates 
upward or downward currents in the atmosphere above it, and, conse¬ 
quently, a flow of air toward or from itself. These air streams have a 
certain, though doubtless a very small influence on the force and direction 
of greater atmospheric movements. 

t As a familiar illustration of the influence of the forest in checking 
the movement of winds, I may mention the well-known fact, that the sen¬ 
sible cold is never extreme in thick woods, where the motion of the air is 
little felt. The lumbermen in Canada and the Northern United States 
labor in the woods, without inconvenience, when the mercury stands 
many degrees below the zero of Fahrenheit, while in the open grounds, 
with only a moderate breeze, the same temperature is almost insupport¬ 
able. The engineers and firemen of locomotives, employed on railways 
running through forests of any considerable extent, observe that, in very 
cold weather, it is much easier to keep up the steam while the engine is 
passing through the woods than in the open ground. As soon as the train 
emerges from the shelter of the trees the steam gauge falls, and the stoker 
is obliged to throw in a liberal supply of fuel to bring it up again. 

Another less frequently noticed fact, due, no doubt, in a great measure 


INFLUENCE OF FOREST ON HUMIDITY. 


165 


The vegetable mould, resulting from the decomposition of 
leaves and of wood, carpets the ground with a spongy covering 
which obstructs the evaporation from the mineral earth below, 
drinks up the rains and melting snows that would otherwise 

to the immobility of the air, is, that sounds are transmitted to incredible 
distances in the unbroken forest. Many instances of this have fallen under 
my own observation, and others, yet more striking, have been related to 
me by credible and competent witnesses familiar with a more primitive 
condition of the Anglo-American world. An acute observer of natural 
phenomena, whose childhood and youth were spent in the interior of one 
of the newer New England States, has often told me that when he estab¬ 
lished his home in the forest, he always distinctly heard, in still weather, 
the plash of horses’ feet, when they forded a small brook nearly seven- 
eighths of a mile from his house, though a portion of the wood that inter¬ 
vened consisted of a ridge seventy or eighty feet higher than either the 
house or the ford. 

I have no doubt that, in such cases, the stillness of the air is the most 
important element in the extraordinary transmissibility of sound ; but it 
must be admitted that the absence of the multiplied and confused noises, 
which accompany human industry in countries thickly peopled by man, 
contributes to the same result. We become, by habit, almost insensible to 
the familiar and never-resting voices of civilization in cities and towns; 
but the indistinguishable drone, which sometimes escapes even the ear of 
him who listens for it, deadens and often quite obstructs the transmission 
of sounds which would otherwise be clearly audible. An observer, who 
wishes to appreciate that hum of civic life which he cannot analyze, will 
find an excellent opportunity by placing himself on the hill of Capo di 
Monte at Naples, in the line of prolongation of the street called Spac- 
canapoli. 

It is probably to the stillness of which I have spoken, that we are to 
ascribe the transmission of sound to great distances at sea in calm weather. 
In June, 1853, I and my family were passengers on board a ship of war 
bound up the AEgean. On the evening of the 27th of that month, as we 
were discussing, at the tea table, some observations of Humboldt on this 
subject, the captain of the ship told us that he had once heard a single gun 
at sea at the distance of ninety nautical miles. The next morning, though 
a light breeze had sprung up from the north, the sea was of glassy smooth¬ 
ness when we went on deck. As we came up, an officer told us that he 
had heard a gun at sunrise, and the conversation of the previous evening 
suggested the inquiry whether it could have been fired from the combined 
French and English fleet then lying at Beshika Bay. Upon examination 
of our position we were found to have been, at sunrise, ninety sea miles 


166 


ABSORPTION OF MOISTURE BY TREES. 


flow rapidly over the surface and perhaps be conveyed to the 
distant sea, and then slowly gives out, by evaporation, infiltra¬ 
tion, and percolation, the moisture thus imbibed. The roots, 
too, penetrate far below the superficial soil, conduct the water 
along their surface to the lower depths to which they reach, 
and thus serve to drain the superior strata and remove the 
moisture out of the reach of evaporation. 


b. The Forest as Organic. 

These are the principal modes in which the humidity of 
the atmosphere is affected by the forest regarded as lifeless 
matter. Let us inquire how its organic processes act upon 
this meteorological element. 

The commonest observation shows that the wood and bark 
of living trees are always more or less pervaded with watery 
and other fluids, one of which, the sap, is very abundant in 
trees of deciduous foliage when the buds begin to swell and 
the leaves to develop themselves in the spring. The outer 
bark of most trees is of a corky character, not admitting the 
absorption of much moisture from the atmosphere through its 
pores, and we can hardly suppose that the buds are able to 

from that point. "We continued beating up northward, and between sun¬ 
rise and twelve o’clock meridian of the 28th, we had made twelve miles 
northing, reducing our distance from Beshika Bay to seventy-eight sea 
miles. At noon we heard several guns so distinctly that we were able to 
count the number. On the 29th we came up with the fleet, and learned 
from an officer who came on hoard that a royal salute had been fired at 
noon on the 28th, in honor of the day as the anniversary of the Queen of 
England’s coronation. The report at sunrise was evidently the morning 
gun, those at noon the salute. 

Such cases are rare, because the sea is seldom still, and the kv^gtoov 
dvripi^ixov yeXacrfia rarely silent, over so great a space as ninety or even 
seventy-eight nautical miles. I apply the epithet silent to y eXao-pa advi¬ 
sedly. I am convinced that iEschylus meant the audible laugh of the 
waves, which is indeed of countless multiplicity, not the visible smile of 
the sea, which, belonging to the great expanse-as one impersonation, is sin¬ 
gle, though, like the human smile, made up of the play of many features. 


ABSORPTION OF MOISTURE BY TREES. 


167 


extract from the air a much larger supply. The obvious con¬ 
clusion as to the source from which the extraordinary quantity 
of sap at this season is derived, is that to which scientific 
investigation leads us, namely, that it is absorbed from the 
earth by the roots, and thence distributed to all parts of the 
plant. Popular opinion, indeed, supposes that all the vege¬ 
table fluids, during the entire period 0 f growth, are thus drawn 
from the bosom of the earth, and that the wood and other 
products of the tree are wholly formed from matter held in 
solution in the water abstracted by the roots from the ground. 
This is an error, for, not only is the solid matter of the tree, in 
a certain proportion not important to our present inquiry, 
received from the atmosphere in a gaseous form, through the 
pores of the leaves and of the young shoots, but water in the 
state of vapor is absorbed and contributed to the circulation, 
by the same organs.* The amount of water taken up by the 
roots, however, is vastly greater than that imbibed through the 
leaves, especially at the season when the juices are most abun- 

* “ The presence of watery vapor in the air is general. * * * Vege¬ 
table surfaces are endowed with the power of absorbing gases, vapors, 
and also, no doubt, the various soluble bodies which are presented to them. 
The inhalation of humidity is carried on by the leaves upon a large scale; 
the dew of a cold summer night revives the groves and the meadows, and 
a single shower of rain suffices to refresh the verdure of a forest which a 
long drought had parched.”— SonAOHT, Les Arbres , ix, p. 340. 

The absorption of the vapor of water by leaves is disputed. “ The 
absorption of watery vapor by the leaves of plants is, according to Unger’s 
experiments, inadmissible.”— Wilhelm, Der Boden und das Wdsser, p. 19. 
If this latter view is correct, the apparently refreshing effects of atmos¬ 
pheric humidity upon vegetation must be ascribed to moisture absorbed by 
the ground from the air and supplied to the roots. In some recent experi¬ 
ments by Dr. Sachs, a porous flower-pot, with a plant growing in it, was 
left unwatered until the earth was dry, and the plant began to languish. 
The pot was then placed in a glass case containing air, which was kept 
always saturated with humidity, but no water was supplied, and the leaves 
of the plant were exposed to the open atmosphere. The soil in the flower 
pot absorbed from the air moisture enough to revive the foliage, and keep 
it a long time green, but not enough to promote development of new leaves. 
—Id., ibid., p. 18. 


168 


MOSSES AND FUNGI. 


dant, and when, as we have seen, the leaves are yet in embryo. 
The quantity of water thus received from the air and the earth, 
in a single year, by a wood of even a hundred acres is very 
great, though experiments are wanting to furnish the data for 
even an approximate estimate of its measure; for only the 
vaguest conclusions can be drawn from the observations which 
have been made on the imbibition and exhalation of water by 
trees and other plants reared in artificial conditions diverse 
from those of the natural forest.* 

Wood Mosses and Fungi . 

Besides the water drawn by the roots from the earth, and 
the vapor absorbed by the leaves from the air, the wood 
mosses and fungi, which abound in all dense forests, take up 
a great quantity of moisture from the atmosphere when it is 
charged with humidity, and exhale it again when the air is 
dry. These humble organizations, which play a more import¬ 
ant part in regulating the humidity of the air than writers on 
the forest have usually assigned to them, perish with the trees 
they grow on ; but, in many situations, nature provides a com¬ 
pensation for the tree mosses in ground species, which, on cold 
soils, especially those with a northern exposure, spring up 
abundantly both before the woods are felled, and when the 
land is cleared and employed for pasturage, or deserted. 
These mosses discharge a portion of the functions appropriated 
to the wood, and while they render the soil of improved lands 
much less fit for agricultural use, they, at the same time, pre¬ 
pare it for the growth of a new harvest of trees, when the 
infertility they produce shall have driven man to abandon it 
and suffer it to relapse into the hands of nature.f 

* The experiments of Hales and others, on the absorption and exhala¬ 
tion of water by vegetables, are of the highest physiological interest; but 
observations on sunflowers, cabbages, hops, and single branches of isolated 
trees, growing in artificially prepared soils and under artificial conditions, 
furnish no trustworthy data for computing the quantity of water received 
and given off by the natural wood. 

+ In the primitive forest, except where the soil is too wet for the dense 


169 


SAP OF SUGAR MAPLE. 

Flow of Sap. 

Tlie amount of sap which can be withdrawn from living 
trees furnishes, not indeed a measure of the quantity of water 
sucked up by their roots from the ground—for we cannot 
extract from a tree its whole moisture—hut numerical data 
which may aid the imagination to form a general notion of the 
powerful action of the forest as an absorbent of humidity from 
the earth. 

The only forest tree known to Europe and North America, 
the sap of which is largely enough applied to economical uses 
to have made the amount of its flow a matter of practical 
importance and popular observation, is the sugar maple, Acer 
saccharinum , of the Anglo-American Provinces and States. 
In the course of a single “ sugar season,” which lasts ordinarily 
from twenty-five to thirty days, a sugar maple two feet in 
diameter will yield not less than twenty gallons of sap, and 
sometimes much more.* This, however, is hut a trifling pro- 

growth of trees, the ground is generally too thickly covered with leaves 
to allow much room for ground mosses. In the more open woods of 
Europe, this form of vegetation is more frequent—as, indeed, are many 
other small plants of a more inviting character—than in the native Ameri¬ 
can forest. See, on the cryptogams and wood plants, Rossmasslek, Dev 
Wald , pp. 33 et seqq. 

* Emerson (Trees of Massachusetts , p. 493) mentions a maple six feet 
in diameter, as having yielded a barrel, or thirty-one and a half gallons 
of sap in twenty-four hours, and another, the dimensions of which are not 
stated, as having yielded one hundred and seventy-five gallons in the course 
of the season. The Cultivator , an American agricultural journal, for June, 
1842, states that twenty gallons of sap were drawn in eighteen hours from 
a single maple, two and a half feet in diameter, in the town of Warner, 
New Hampshire, and the truth of this account has been verified by per¬ 
sonal inquiry made in my behalf. This tree was of the original forest 
growth, and had been left standing when the ground around it was cleared. 
It was tapped only every other year, and then with six or eight incisions. 
Dr. Williams (.History of Vermont , i, p. 91) says: “A man much em¬ 
ployedinmaking maple sugar, found that, for twenty-one days together, 
a maple tree discharged seven and a half gallons per day.” 

An intelligent correspondent, of much experience in the manufacture 


170 


SAP OF SUGAR MAPLE. 


portion of tlie water abstracted from tbe eartb by tbe roots, 
during this season, when tbe yet undeveloped leaves can bardly 
absorb an appreciable quantity of vapor from tlie atmos¬ 
phere ; * for all this fluid runs from two or three incisions or 
auger holes, so narrow as to intercept the current of compara¬ 
tively few sap vessels, and besides, experience shows that large 
as is the quantity withdrawn from the circulation, it is rela¬ 
tively too small to affect very sensibly the growth of the tree.f 
The number of large maple trees on an acre is frequently not 
less than fifty, X and of course the quantity of moisture ab- 

of maple sugar, writes me that a second-growth maple, of about two feet 
in diameter, standing in open ground, tapped with four incisions, has, for 
several seasons, generally run eight gallons per day in fair weather. He 
speaks of a very large tree, from which sixty gallons were drawn in the 
course of a season, and of another, something more than three feet through, 
which made forty-two pounds of wet sugar, and must have yielded not 
lees than one hundred and fifty gallons. 

* “ The buds of the maple,” says the same correspondent, “ do not start 
till toward the close of the sugar season. As soon as they begin to swell, 
the sap seems less sweet, and the sugar made from it is of a darker color, 
and with less of the distinctive maple flavor.” 

t “ In this region, maples are usually tapped with a three-quarter inch 
bit, boring to the depth of one and a half or two inches. In the smaller 
trees, one incision only is made, two in those of eighteen inches in diame¬ 
ter, and four in trees of larger size. Two f-inch holes in a tree twenty- 
two inches in diameter = yg- of the circumference, and of the area 
of section.” 

“ Tapping does not check the growth, hut does injure the quality of 
the wood of maples. The wood of trees often tapped is lighter and less 
dense than that of trees which have not been tapped, and gives less heat 
in burning. No difference has been observed in the starting of the buds 
of tapped and untapped trees .”—Same correspondent . 

t Hr. Rush, in a letter to Jefferson, states the number of maples fit 
for tapping on an acre at from thirty to fifty. “This,” observes my cor¬ 
respondent, “ is correct with regard to the original growth, which is always 
more or less intermixed with other trees; but in second growth, com¬ 
posed of maples alone, the number greatly exceeds this. I have had the 
maples on a quarter of an acre, which I thought about an average of 
second-growth ‘ maple orchards,’ counted. The number was found to be 
fifty-two, of which thirty-two were ten inches or more in diameter, and, 
of course, large enough to tap. This gives two hundred and eight trees 



SAP OF TREES. 


171 


stracted from the soil by this tree alone is measured by thou¬ 
sands of gallons to the acre. The sugar orchards, as they are 
called, contain also many young maples too small for tapping, 
and numerous other trees—two of which, at least, the black 
birch, Betula lenta , and yellow birch, Betula excelsa , both 
very common in the same climate, are far more abundant in 
sap than the maple *—are scattered among the sugar trees; 
for the North American native forests are remarkable for the 
mixture of their crops. 

The sap of the maple and of other trees with deciduous 
leaves which grow in the same climate, flows most freely in 
the early spring, and especially in clear weather, when the 
nights are frosty and the days warm; for it is then that the 
melting snows supply the earth with moisture in the justest 
proportion, and that the absorbent power of the roots is stimu¬ 
lated to its highest activity.f 

to the acre, one hundred and twenty-eight of which were of proper size 
for tapping.” 

According to the census returns, the quantity of maple sugar made in 
the United States in 1850 was 84,253,436 pounds ; in 1860, it was 38,863,- 
884 pounds, besides 1,944,594 gallons of molasses. The cane sugar made 
in 1850 amounted to 237,133,000 pounds; in 1859, to 302,205,000.— Pre¬ 
liminary Report on the Eighth Census , p. 88. 

According to Bigelow, Les j&tats Unis PAmerique en 1863, chap, iv, 
the sugar product of Louisiana alone for 1862 is estimated at 528,321,500 
pounds. 

* The correspondent already referred to informs me that a black birch, 
tapped about noon with two incisions, was found the next morning to have 
yielded sixteen gallons. Dr. Williams {History of Vermont , i, p. 91) says: 
“ A large birch, tapped in the spring, ran at the rate of five gallons an hour 
when first tapped. Eight or nine days after, it was found to run at the 
rate of about two and a half gallons an hour, and at the end of fifteen 
days the discharge continued in nearly the same quantity. The sap con¬ 
tinued to flow for four or five weeks, and it was the opinion of the ob¬ 
servers that it must have yielded as much as sixty barrels [1,890 gallons].” 

t “ The best state of weather for a good run,” says my correspondent, 
“ is clear days, thawing fast in the daytime and freezing well at night, 
with a gentle west or northwest wind; though we sometimes have clear, 
fine, thawing days followed by frosty nights, without a good run of sap. 


172 ABSORPTION BY FOLIAGE. 

When the buds are ready to burst, and the green leaves 
begin to show themselves beneath their scaly covering, the 
ground has become drier, the thirst of the roots is quenched, 
and the flow of sap from them to the stem is greatly dimin¬ 
ished* 

Absorption and Exhalation of Moisture. 

The leaves now commence the process of absorption, and 
imbibe both uncombined gases and an unascertained but per¬ 
haps considerable quantity of watery vapor from the humid 
atmosphere of spring which bathes them. 

The organic action of the tree, as thus far described, tends 
to the desiccation of air and earth; but when we consider 
what volumes of water are daily absorbed by a large tree, and 
how small a proportion of the weight of this fluid consists of 
matter which enters into new combinations, and becomes a 

/ I have thought it probable that the irregular flow of sap on different days 
in the same season is connected with the variation in atmospheric pressure; 
for the atmospheric conditions above mentioned as those most favorable 
to a free flow of sap are also those in which the barometer usually indi¬ 
cates pressure considerably above the mean. With a south or southeast 
wind, and in lowering weather, which causes a fall in the barometer, the 
flow generally ceases, though the sap sometimes runs till after the begin¬ 
ning of the storm. With a gentle wind, south of west, maples sometimes 
run all night. When this occurs, it is oftenest shortly before a storm. 
Last spring, the sap of a sugar orchard in a neighboring town flowed the 
greater part of the time for two days and two nights successively, and did 
not cease till after the commencement of a rain storm.” 

The cessation of the flow of sap at night is perhaps in part to be as¬ 
cribed to the nocturnal frost, which checks the melting of the snow, of 
course diminishing the supply of moisture in the ground, and sometimes 
congeals the strata from which the rootlets suck in water. From the facts 
already mentioned, however, and from other well-known circumstances— 
such, for example, as the more liberal flow of sap from incisions on the 
south side of the trunk—it is evident that the withdrawal of the stimu¬ 
lating influences of the sun’s light and heat is the principal cause of the 
suspension of the circulation in the night. 

* “ The flow ceases altogether soon after the buds begin to swell.”— 
Letter before quoted. 


EXHALATION OF VAPOR BY TREES. 


173 


part of the solid framework of the vegetable, or a component 
of its deciduous products, it is evident that the superfluous 
moisture must somehow be carried off almost as rapidly as it 
flows into the tree.* At the very commencement of vegeta- 

^ We might obtain a contribution to an approximate estimate of the 
quantity of moisture abstracted by forest vegetation from the earth and the 
air, by ascertaining, as nearly as possible, the quantity of wood on a given 
area, the proportion of assimilable matter contained in the fluids of the 
tree at different seasons of the year, the ages of the trees respectively, and 
the quantity of leaf and seed annually shed by them. The results would, 
indeed, be very vague, but they might serve to check or confirm estimates 
arrived at by other processes. The following facts are items too loose 
perhaps to be employed as elements in such a computation. 

Dr. Williams, who wrote when the woods of Northern New England 
were generally in their primitive condition, states the number of trees grow¬ 
ing on an acre at from one hundred and fifty to six hundred and fifty, 
according to their size and the quality of the soil; the quantity of wood, 
at from fifty to two hundred cords, or from 237 to 1,048 cubic yards, but 
adds that on land covered with pines, the quantity of wood would be much 
greater. Whether he means to give the entire solid contents of the tree, 
or, as is usual in ordinary estimates in New England, the marketable wood 
only, the trunks and larger branches, does not appear. Next to the pine, 
the maple would probably yield a larger amount to a given area than any 
of the other trees mentioned by Dr. Williams, but mixed wood, in general, 
measures most. In a good deal of observation on this subject, the largest 
quantity of marketable wood I have ever known cut on an acre of virgin 
forest was one hundred and four cords, or 493 cubic yards, and half that 
amount is considered a very fair yield. The smaller trees, branches, and 
twigs would not increase the quantity more than twenty-five per cent., 
and if we add as much more for the roots, we should have a total of about 
750 cubic yards. I think Dr. Williams’s estimate too large, though it 
would fall much below the product of the great trees of the Mississippi 
Valley, of Oregon, and of California. It should be observed that these 
measurements are those of the wood as it lies when ‘ corded ’ or piled up 
for market, and exceed the real solid contents by not less than fifteen per 
cent. 

“In a soil of medium quality,” says Clave, quoting the estimates of 
Pfeil, for the climate of Prussia, “the volume of a hectare of pines twenty 
years old, would exceed 80 cubic mbtres [42| cubic yards to the acre]; it 
would amount to but 24 in a meagre soil. This tree attains its maximum 
of mean growth at the age of seventy-five years. At that age, in the 
sandy earth of Prussia, it produces annually about 5 cubic metres, with a 


174 


EXHALATION OF VAPOR BY TREES. 


tion in spring, some of this fluid certainly escapes through the 
buds, the nascent foliage, and the pores of the bark, and vege¬ 
table physiology tells us that there is a current of sap toward 
the roots as well as from them.* I do not know that the 
exudation of water into the earth, through the bark or at the 
extremities of these latter organs, has been directly proved, 
but the other known modes of carrying off the surplus do not 
seem adequate to dispose of it at the almost leafless period 
when it is most abundantly received, and it is therefore diffi¬ 
cult to believe that the roots do not, to some extent, drain as 
well as flood the watercourses of their stem. Later in the season 
the roots absorb less, and the now developed leaves exhale a 
vastly increased quantity of moisture into the air. In any 
event, all the water derived by the growing tree from the 
atmosphere and the ground is returned again by transpiration 

total volume of 311 cubic metres per hectare [166 cubic yards per acre]. 
After this age the volume increases, but the mean rate of growth dimin¬ 
ishes. At eighty years, for instance, the volume is 335 cubic metres, the 
annual production 4 only. The beech reaches its maximum of annual 
growth at one hundred and twenty years. It then has a total volume of 
633 cubic metres to the hectare [335 cubic yards to the acre], and pro¬ 
duces 5 cubic metres per year.”— Clave:, Etudes , p. 151. 

These measures, I believe, include the entire ligneous product of the 
tree, exclusive of the roots, and express the actual solid contents. The 
specific gravity of maple wood is stated to be 75. Maple sap yields sugar 
at the rate of about one pound wet sugar to three gallons of sap, and wet 
sugar is to dry sugar in about the proportion of nineteen to sixteen. Be¬ 
sides the sugar, there is a small residuum of “ sand,” composed of phosphate 
of lime, with a little silex, and it is certain that by the ordinary hasty 
process of manufacture, a good deal of sugar is lost; for the drops, con¬ 
densed from the vapor of the boilers on the rafters of the rude sheds 
where the sap is boiled, have a decidedly sweet taste. 

* “ The elaborated sap, passing out of the leaves, is received into the 
inner bark, * * * and a part of what descends finds its way even to 
the ends of the roots, and is all along diffused laterally into the stem, 
where it meets and mingles with the ascending crude sap or raw material. 
So there is no separate circulation of the two kinds of sap ; and no crude 
sap exists separately in any part of the plant. Even in the root, where it 
enters, this mingles at once with some elaborated sap already there.”— 
Gray, How Plants Grow, § 273. 


REFRIGERATION BY EXHALATION. 


175 


or exudation, after having surrendered to the plant the small 
proportion of matter required for vegetable growth which it 
held in solution or suspension.* The hygrometrical equilib¬ 
rium is then restored, so far as this : the tree yields up again 
the moisture it had drawn from the earth and the air, though 
it does not return it each to each ; for the vapor carried oft* by 
transpiration greatly exceeds the quantity of water absorbed by 
the foliage from the atmosphere, and the amount, if any, car¬ 
ried back to the ground by the roots. 

The evaporation of the juices of the plant, by whatever 
process effected, takes up atmospheric heat and produces re¬ 
frigeration. This effect is not less real, though much less 
sensible, in the forest than in meadow or pasture land, and it 
cannot be doubted that the local temperature is considerably 
affected by it. But the evaporation that cools the ah' diffuses 
through it, at the same time, a medium which powerfully 
resists the escape of heat from the earth by radiation. Visible 
vapors or clouds, it is well known, prevent frosts by obstruct- 

* Ward’s tight glazed cases for raising, and especially for transporting 
plants, go far to prove that water only circulates through vegetables, and 
is again and again absorbed and transpired by organs appropriated to these 
functions. Seeds, growing grasses, shrubs, or trees planted in proper earth, 
moderately watered and covered with a glass bell or close frame of glass, 
live for months and even years, with only the original store of air and 
water. In one of Ward’s early experiments, a spire of grass and a fern, 
which sprang up in a corked bottle containing a little moist earth intro¬ 
duced as a bed for a snail, lived and flourished for eighteen years without 
a new supply of either fluid. In these boxes the plants grow till the en¬ 
closed air is exhausted of the gaseous constituents of vegetation, and till 
the water has yielded up the assimilable matter it held in solution, and dis¬ 
solved and supplied to the roots the nutriment contained in the earth in 
which they are planted. After this, they continue for a long time in a 
state of vegetable sleep, but if fresh air and water be introduced into the 
cases, or the plants be transplanted into open ground, they rouse them¬ 
selves to renewed life, and grow vigorously, without appearing to have suf¬ 
fered from their long imprisonment. The water transpired by the leaves 
is partly absorbed by the earth directly from the air, partly condensed on 
the glass, along which it trickles down to the earth, enters the roots again, 
and thus continually repeats the circuit. See Aus der Natur , 21, B. S. 537. 


176 


CONDENSATION OF ABSORBED VAPOR. 


ing radiation, or rather by reflecting back again the heat 
radiated by the earth, just as any mechanical screen would 
do. On the other hand, clouds intercept the rays of the sun 
also, and hinder its heat from reaching the earth. The invis¬ 
ible vapors given out by leaves impede the passage of heat 
reflected and radiated by the earth and by all terrestrial 
objects, but oppose much less resistance to the transmission of 
direct solar heat, and indeed the beams of the sun seem more 
scorching when received through clear air charged with uncon¬ 
densed moisture than after passing through a dry atmosphere. 
Hence the reduction of temperature by the evaporation of 
moisture from vegetation, though sensible, is less than it would 
be if water in the gaseous state were as impervious to heat given 
out by the sun as to that emitted by terrestrial objects. 

The hygroscopicity of vegetable mould is much greater than 
that of any mineral earth, and therefore the soil of the forest 
absorbs more atmospheric moisture than the open ground. The 
condensation of the vapor by absorption disengages heat, and 
consequently raises the temperature of the soil which absorbs 
it. Yon Babo found the temperature of sandy earth thus 
elevated from 20° to 27° centigrade, making a difference of 
nearly thirteen degrees of Fahrenheit, and that of soil rich 
in humus from 20° to 31° centigrade, a difference of almost 
twenty degrees of Fahrenheit.* 


Balance of Conflicting Influences . 

We have shown that the forest, considered as dead matter, 
tends to diminish the moisture of the air, by preventing the 
sun’s rays from reaching the ground and evaporating the 

* Wilhelm, Der Boden und das Wasser , p. 18. It is not ascertained in 
what proportions the dew is evaporated, and in what it is absorbed by the 
earth, in actual nature, but there can be no doubt that the amount of water 
taken up by the ground, both from vapor suspended in the air and from 
dew, is large. The annual fall of dew in England is estimated at five 
inches, but this quantity is much exceeded in many countries with a 
clearer sky. “ In many of our Algerian campaigns,” says Babinet, “ when 


CONFLICTING INFLUENCES. 


177 


water that falls upon the surface, and also by spreading over 
the earth a spongy mantle which sucks up and retains the 
humidity it receives from the atmosphere, while, at the same 
time, this covering acts in the contrary direction by accumu¬ 
lating, in a reservoir, not wholly inaccessible to vaporizing 
influences, the water of precipitation which might otherwise 
suddenly sink deep into the bowels of the earth, or flow by 
superficial channels to other climatic regions. We now see 
that, as a living organism, it tends, on the one hand, to dimin¬ 
ish the humidity of the air by absorbing moisture from it, and, 
on the other, to increase that humidity by pouring out into the 
atmosphere, in a vaporous form, the water it draws up through 
its roots. This last operation, at the same time, lowers the 
temperature of the air in contact with or proximity to the 
wood, by the same law as in other cases of the conversion of 
water into vapor. 

As I have repeatedly said, we cannot measure the value of 
any one of these elements of climatic disturbance, raising or 
lowering of temperature, increase or diminution of humidity, 
nor can we say that in any one season, any one year, or any 
one fixed cycle, however long or short, they balance and com¬ 
pensate each other. They are sometimes, but certainly not 
always, contemporaneous in their action, whether their tend¬ 
ency is in the same or in opposite directions, and, therefore, 
their influence is sometimes cumulative, sometimes conflicting ; 
but, upon the whole, their general effect seems to be to miti¬ 
gate extremes of atmospheric heat and cold, moisture and 
drought. They serve as equalizers of temperature and hu¬ 
midity, and it is highly probable that, in analogy with most 
other works and workings of nature, they, at certain or uncer¬ 
tain periods, restore the equilibrium which, whether as lifeless 
masses or as living organisms, they may have temporarily 
disturbed. 

it was wished to punish the brigandage of the unsubdued tribes, it was im¬ 
possible to set their grain fields on fire until a late hour of the day; for 
the plants were so wet with the night dew that it was necessary to wait 
until the sun had dried them .”—Etudes et Lectures , ii, p. 212. 

12 


178 


INFLUENCE ON PEECIPITATION. 


When, therefore, man destroyed these natural harmonizers 
of climatic discords, he sacrificed an important conservative 
power, though it is far from certain that he has thereby 
affected the mean, however much he may have exaggerated 
the extremes of atmospheric temperature and humidity, or, in 
other words, may have increased the range and lengthened the 
scale of thermometric and hygrometric variation. 

Influence of the Forest on Temperature and Precipitation. 

Aside from the question of compensation, it does not seem 
probable that the forests sensibly affect the total quantity of 
precipitation, or the general mean of atmospheric temperature 
of the globe, or even that they had this influence when their 
extent was vastly greater than at present. The waters cover 
about three fourths of the face of the earth,* and if we deduct 
the frozen zones, the peaks and crests of lofty mountains and 

* “ It has been concluded that the dry land occupies about 49,800,000 
square statute miles. This does not include the recently discovered tracts 
of land in the vicinity of the poles, and allowing for yet undiscovered land 
(which, however, can only exist in small quantity), if we assign 51,000,000 
to the land, there will remain about 146,000,000 of square miles for the 
extent of surface occupied by the ocean.”—Sir J. F. W. Herschel, Physical 
Geography , 1861, p. 19. 

It does not appear to which category Herschel assigns the inland seas 
and the fresh-water lakes and rivers of the earth; and Mrs. Somerville, 
who states that the “ dry land occupies an area of 38,000,000 of square 
miles,” and that “the ocean covers nearly three fourths of the surface of 
the globe,” is equally silent on this point .—Physical Geography , fifth 
edition, p. 30. On the following page, Mrs. Somerville, in a note, cites 
Mr. Gardner as her authority, and says that, “according to his com¬ 
putation, the extent of land is about 37,673,000 square British miles, inde¬ 
pendently of Victoria Continent; and the sea occupies 110,849,000. Hence 
the land is to the sea as 1 to 4 nearly.” Sir John F. W. Herschel makes 
the area of dryland and ocean together 197,000,000 square miles; Mrs. 
Somerville, or rather Mr. Gardner, 148,522,000. I suppose Sir John 
Herschel includes the islands in his aggregate of the “ dry land,” and the 
inland waters under the general designation of the “ ocean,” and that Mrs. 
Somerville excludes both. 


INFLUENCE ON PRECIPITATION-GENERAL RESULT. 179 

their craggy slopes, the Sahara and other great African and 
Asiatic deserts, and all such other portions of the solid surface 
as are permanently unfit for the growth of wood, we shall find 
that probably not one tenth of the total superficies of our 
planet was ever, at any one time in the present geological 
epoch, covered with forests. Besides this, the distribution of 
forest land, of desert, and of water, is such as to reduce the 
possible influence of the former to a low expression; for the 
forests are, in large proportion, situated in cold or temperate 
climates, where the action of the sun is comparatively feeble 
both in elevating temperature and in promoting evaporation ; 
while, in the torrid zone, the desert and the sea—the latter of 
which always presents an evaporable surface—enormously pre¬ 
ponderate. It is, upon the whole, not probable that so small 
an extent of forest, so situated, could produce an appreciable 
influence on the general climate of the globe, though it might 
appreciably affect the local action of all climatic elements. 
The total annual amount of solar heat absorbed and radiated 
by the earth, and the sum of terrestrial evaporation and atmos¬ 
pheric precipitation must be supposed constant; but the distri¬ 
bution of heat and of humidity is exposed to disturbance in 
both time and place, by a multitude of local causes, among 
which the presence or absence of the forest is doubtless one. 

So far as we are able to sum up the general results, it would 
appear that, in countries in the temperate zone still chiefly 
covered with wood, the summers would be cooler, moister, 
shorter, the winters milder, drier, longer, than in the same 
regions after the removal of the forest. The slender historical 
evidence we possess seems to point to the same conclusion, 
though there is some conflict of testimony and of opinion on 
this point, and some apparently well-established exceptions to 
particular branches of what appears to be the general law. 

One of these occurs both in climates where the cold of 
winter is severe enough to freeze the ground to a considerable 
depth, as in Sweden and the Northern States of the American 
Union, and in milder zones, where the face of the earth is 
exposed to cold mountain winds, as in some parts of Italy and 


180 


WINTER IN COLD CLIMATES. 


of France ; for there, as we have seen, the winter is believed 
to extend itself into the months which belong to the spring, 
later than at periods when the forest covered the greater part 
of the ground.* More causes than one doubtless contribute to 
this result; but in the case of Sweden and the United States, 
the most obvious explanation of the fact is to be found in the 
loss of the shelter afforded to the ground by the thick coating 
of leaves which the forest sheds upon it, and the snow which 
the woods protect from blowing away, or from melting in the 
brief thaws of winter. I have already remarked that bare 
ground freezes much deeper than that which is covered by 
beds of leaves, and when the earth is thickly coated with 
snow, the strata frozen before it fell begin to thaw. It is not 
uncommon to find the ground in the woods, where the snow 
lies two or three feet deep, entirely free from frost, when the 
atmospheric temperature has been for several weeks below the 
freezing point, and for some days even below the zero of Fahr¬ 
enheit. When the ground is cleared and brought under culti¬ 
vation, the leaves are ploughed into the soil and decomposed, 
and the snow, especially upon knolls and eminences, is blown 

* It has been observed in Sweden that the spring, in many districts 
where the forests have been cleared off, now comes on a fortnight later 
than in the last century. —Asbjornsen, Oni Skovene i Norge, p. 101. 

The conclusion arrived at by Noah Webster, in his very learned and 
able paper on the supposed change in the temperature of wunter, read be¬ 
fore the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1799, was as fol¬ 
lows: “From a careful comparison of these facts, it appears that the 
weather, in modern winters, in the United States, is more inconstant than 
when the earth was covered with woods, at the first settlement of Euro¬ 
peans in the country; that the warm weather of autumn extends further 
into the winter months, and the cold weather of winter and spring en¬ 
croaches upon the summer; that, the wind being more variable, snow is 
less permanent, and perhaps the same remark may be applicable to the ice 
of the rivers. These effects seem to result necessarily from the greater 
quantity of heat accumulated in the earth in summer since the ground 
has been cleared of wood and exposed to the rays of the sun, and to the 
greater depth of frost in the earth in winter by the exposure of its un¬ 
covered surface to the cold atmosphere .”—Collection of Papers by Noah 
Webster, p. 162. 


INFLUENCE OF WOODS ON PRECIPITATION. 


181 


off, or perhaps half thawed, several times during the winter. 
The water from the melting snow runs into the depressions, 
and when, after a day or two of warm sunshine or tepid rain, 
the cold returns, it is consolidated to ice, and the hared ridges 
and swells of earth are deeply frozen.* It requires many days 
of mild weather to raise the temperature of soil in this condi¬ 
tion, and of the air in contact with it, to that of the earth in 
the forests of the same climatic region. Flora is already plait¬ 
ing her sylvan wreath before the corn flowers which are to 
deck the garland of Ceres have waked from their winter’s 
sleep ; and it is not a popular error to believe that, where 
man has substituted his artificial crops for the spontaneous 
harvest of nature, spring delays her coming. 

In many cases, the apparent change in the period of the 
seasons is a purely local phenomenon, which is probably com¬ 
pensated by a higher temperature in other months, without 
any real disturbance of the average thermometrical equilib¬ 
rium. We may easily suppose that there are analogous par¬ 
tial deviations from the general law of precipitation; and, 
without insisting that the removal of the forest has diminished 
the sum total of snow and rain, we may well admit that it has 
lessened the quantity which annually falls within particular 
limits. Yarious theoretical considerations make this probable, 
the most obvious argument, perhaps, being that drawn from 
the generally admitted fact, that the summer and even the 
mean temperature of the forest is below that of the open coun¬ 
try in the same latitude. If the air in a wood is cooler than 
that around it, it must reduce the temperature of the atmos¬ 
pheric stratum immediately above it, and, of course, whenever 
a saturated current sweeps over it, it must produce precipita¬ 
tion which would fall upon or near it. 

But the subject is so exceedingly complex and difficult, 

* I have seen, in Northern New England, the surface of the open 
ground frozen to the depth of twenty-two inches, in the month of Novem¬ 
ber, when in the forest earth no frost was discoverable; and later in the 
winter, I have known an exposed sand knoll to remain frozen six feet 
deep, after the ground in the woods was completely thawed. 


182 


INUNDATIONS. 


that it is safer to regard it as a historical problem, or at least 
as what lawyers call a mixed question of law and fact, than to 
attempt to decide it upon d priori grounds. Unfortunately the 
evidence is conflicting in tendency, and sometimes equivocal in 
interpretation, but I believe that a majority of the foresters 
and physicists who have studied the question are of opinion 
that in many, if not in all cases, the destruction of the woods 
has been followed by a diminution in the annual quantity of 
rain and dew. Indeed, it has long been a popularly settled 
belief that vegetation and the condensation and fall of atmos* 
pheric moisture are reciprocally necessary to each other, and 
even the poets sing of 

Afric’s barren sand, 

Where nought can grow, because it raineth not, 

And where no rain can fall to bless the land, 

Because nought grows there.* 

Before stating the evidence on the general question and 
citing the judgments of the learned upon it, however, it is w T ell 
to remark that the comparative variety or frequency of inun¬ 
dations in earlier and later centuries is not necessarily, in most 
cases not probably, entitled to any weight whatever, as a proof 
that more or less rain fell formerly than now; because the 
accumulation of water in the channel of a river depends far 
less upon the quantity of precipitation in its valley, than upon 
the rapidity with which it is conducted, on or under the sur¬ 
face of the ground, to the central artery that drains the basin. 
But this point will be more fully discussed in a subsequent 
chapter. 

There is another important observation which may prop¬ 
erly be introduced here. It is not universally, or even gener¬ 
ally true, that the atmosphere returns its humidity to the local 

* -Bet golde Strog i Afrika, 

Ber Intet voxe kan, da ei det regner, 

Og, omvendt, ingen Regn kan falde, da 
Ber Intet voxer. 

Paludan-Mullek, Admn Homo , ii, 408. 



MOVEMENT OF HUMID AIR. 


183 


source from which it receives it. The air is constantly in 
motion, 

-howling tempests scour amain 

From sea to land, from land to sea ; * 

and, therefore, it is always probable that the evaporation 
drawn up by the atmosphere from a given river, or sea, or 
forest, or meadow, will be discharged by precipitation, not at 
or near the point where it rose, but at a distance of miles, 
leagues, or even degrees. The currents of the upper air are 
invisible, and they leave behind them no landmark to record 
their track. We know not whence they come, or whither 
they go. We have a certain rapidly increasing acquaintance 
with the laws of general atmospheric motion, but of the origin 
and limits, the beginning and end of that motion, as it mani¬ 
fests itself at any particular time and place, we know nothing. 
We cannot say where or when the vapor, exhaled to-day from 
the lake on which we float, will be condensed and fall; 
whether it will waste itself on a barren desert, refresh upland 
pastures, descend in snow on Alpine heights, or contribute to 
swell a distant torrent which shall lay waste square miles of 
fertile corn land; nor do we know whether the rain which 
feeds our brooklets is due to the transpiration from a neigh¬ 
boring forest, or to the evaporation from a far-off sea. If, 
therefore, it were proved that the annual quantity of rain and 
dew is now as great on the plains of Castile, for example, as it 
was when they were covered with the native forest, it would 
by no means follow that those woods did not augment the 
amount of precipitation elsewhere. 

But I return to the question. Beginning with the latest 
authorities, I cite a passage from Clave, f After arguing that 
we cannot reason from the climatic effects of the forest in trop¬ 
ical and sub-tropical countries as to its influence in temperate 

* Und Stiirme brausen um die Wette 

Yom Meer aufs Land, vom Land aufs Meer. 

Goethe, Faust, Song of the Archangels. 

f Etudes sur Vtconomie Forestiere , pp. 45, 46. 



184 


INFLUENCE OF WOODS ON PRECIPITATION. 


latitudes, tlie author proceeds : u The action of the forests on 
rain, a consequence of that which they exercise on tempera¬ 
ture, is difficult to estimate in our climate, but is very pro¬ 
nounced in hot countries, and is established by numerous 
examples. M. Boussingault states that in the region com¬ 
prised between the Bay of Cnpica and the Gulf of Guayaquil, 
which is covered with immense forests, the rains are almost 
continual, and that the mean temperature of this humid country 
rises hardly to twenty-six degrees (= 80° Fahr.). M. Blanqni, 
in his 4 Travels in Bulgaria,’ informs us that at Malta rain has 
become so rare, since the woods were cleared to make room 
for the growth of cotton, that at the time of his visit in Octo¬ 
ber, 1841, not a drop of rain had fallen for three years.* The 
terrible droughts which desolate the Cape Yerd Islands must 
also be attributed to the destruction of the forests. In the 
Island of St. Helena, where the wooded surface has consid¬ 
erably extended within a few years, it has been observed that 
the rain has increased in the same proportion. It is now in 
quantity double what it was during the residence of Napoleon. 
In Egypt, recent plantations have caused rains, which hitherto 
were almost unknown.” 

Schacht observes: “ In wooded countries, the atmosphere 
is generally humid, and rain and dew fertilize the soil. As 
the lightning rod abstracts the electric fluid from the stormy 
sky, so the forest attracts to itself the rain from the clouds, 
which, in falling, refreshes not it alone, but extends its benefits 

* I am not aware of any evidence to show that Malta had any woods 
of importance at any time since the cultivation of cotton was introduced 
there ; and if it is true, as has been often asserted, that its present soil was 
imported from Sicily, it can certainly have possessed no forests since a very 
remote period. In Sandys’s time, 1611, there were no woods in the island, 
and it produced little cotton. He describes it as “ a country altogether 
champion, being no other than a rocke couered ouer with earth, hut two 
feete deepe where the deepest; hauing but few trees hut such as heare 
fruite. * * * So that their wmod they haue from Sicilia.” They have 

“ an indifferent quantity of cotton wooll, but that the best of all other.”_ 

S andys, Travels , p. 228. 

t Sohacitt, Les Arlres, p. 412. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON PRECIPITATION. 185 

to the neighboring fields. * * The forest, presenting a con¬ 
siderable surface for evaporation, gives to its own soil and to 
all the adjacent ground an abundant and enlivening dew. 
There falls, it is true, less dew on a tall and thick wood than 
on the surrounding meadows, which, being more highly 
heated during the day by the influence of insolation, cool with 
greater rapidity by radiation. But it must be remarked, that 
this increased deposition of dew on the neighboring fields is 
partly due to the forests themselves; for the dense, saturated 
strata of air which hover over the woods descend in cool, calm 
evenings, like clouds, to the valley, and in the morning, beads 
of dew sparkle on the leaves of the grass and the flowers of the 
field. Forests, in a word, exert, in the interior of continents, 
an influence like that of the sea on the climate of islands and 
of coasts : both water the soil and thereby insure its fertility.” 
In a note upon this passage, quoting as authority the Historia 
de la Conquista de las siete islas de Gran Canaria , de Juan de 
Abreu Galindo , 1632, p. 47, he adds: “ Old historians relate 
that a celebrated laurel in Ferro formerly furnished drinkable 
water to the inhabitants of the island. The water flowed from 
its foliage, uninterruptedly, drop by drop, and was collected in 
cisterns. Every morning the sea breeze drove a cloud toward 
the wonderful tree, which attracted it to its huge top,” where 
it was condensed to a liquid form. 

In a number of the Missionary Herald , published at Bos¬ 
ton, the date of which I have mislaid, the Rev. Mr. Yan 
Lennep, well known as a competent observer, gives the fol¬ 
lowing remarkable account of a similar fact witnessed by him 
in an excursion to the east of Tocat in Asia Minor : 

“ In this region, some 3,000 feet above the sea, the trees 
are mostly oak, and attain a large size. I noticed an illustra¬ 
tion of the influence of trees in general in collecting moisture. 
Despite the fog, of a week’s duration, the ground was every¬ 
where perfectly dry. The dry oak leaves, however, had gath¬ 
ered the water, and the branches and trunks ot the trees were 
more or less wet. In many cases the water had run down the 
trunk and moistened the soil around the roots ot the tree. In 


186 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON PRECIPITATION. 

two places, several trees had each furnished a small stream of 
water, and these, uniting, had run upon the road, so that trav¬ 
ellers had to pass through the mud ; although, as I said, every¬ 
where else the ground was perfectly dry. Moreover, the col¬ 
lected moisture was not sufficient to drop directly from the 
leaves, but in every case it ran down the branches and trunk 
to the ground. Farther on we found a grove, and at the foot 
of each tree, on the north side, was a lump of ice, the water 
having frozen as it reached the ground. This is a most strik¬ 
ing illustration of the acknowledged influence of trees in col¬ 
lecting moisture; and one cannot for a moment doubt, that 
the parched regions which commence at Sivas, and extend in 
one direction to the Persian Gulf, and in another to the Red 
Sea, were once a fertile garden, teeming with a prosperous 
population, before the forests which covered the hillsides were 
cut down—before the cedar and the fir tree were rooted up 
from the sides of Lebanon. 

“ As we now descended the northern side of the watershed, 
we passed through the grove of walnut, oak, and black mul¬ 
berry trees, which shade the village of Oktab, whose houses, 
cattle, and ruddy children were indicative of prosperity.” 

Coultas thus argues: “ The ocean, winds, and woods may 
be regarded as the several parts of a grand distillatory appa¬ 
ratus. The sea is the boiler in which vapor is raised by the 
solar heat, the winds are the guiding tubes which carry the 
vapor with them to the forests where a lower temperature pre¬ 
vails. This naturally condenses the vapor, and showers of rain 
are thus distilled from the cloud masses which float in the 
atmosphere, by the woods beneath them.” * 

Sir John F. W. Herschel enumerates among “ the influences 
unfavorable to rain,” “ absence of vegetation in warm climates, 
and especially of trees. This is, no doubt,” continues he, u one 
of the reasons of the extreme aridity of Spain. The hatred of 
a Spaniard toward a tree is proverbial. Many districts in 
France have been materially injured by denudation (Earl of 


* What may be learned from a Tree , p. 117. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON PRECIPITATION. 187 

Lovelace on Climate, etc.), and, on the other hand, rain has 
become more frequent in Egypt since the more vigorous culti¬ 
vation of the palm tree.” 

Hohenstein remarks : “ With respect to the temperature in 
the forest, I have already observed that, at certain times of 
the day and of the year, it is less than in the open field. 
Hence the woods may, in the daytime, in summer and to¬ 
ward the end of winter, tend to increase the fall of rain ; but it 
is otherwise in summer nights and at the beginning of winter, 
when there is a higher temperature in the forest, which is not 
favorable to that effect. * * * The wood is, further, like 

the mountain, a mechanical obstruction to the motion of rain 
clouds, and, as it checks them in their course, it gives them 
occasion to deposit their water. These considerations render 
it probable that the forest increases the quantity of rain; but 
they do not establish the certainty of this conclusion, because 
we have no positive numerical data to produce on the de¬ 
pression of temperature, and the humidity of the air in the 
woods.” * 

Barth presents the following view of the subject: u The 
ground in the forest, as well as the atmospheric stratum over 
it, continues humid after the woodless districts have lost their 
moisture ; and the air, charged with the humidity drawn from 
them, is usually carried away by the winds before it has de¬ 
posited itself in a condensed form on the earth. Trees con¬ 
stantly transpire through their leaves a great quantity of moist¬ 
ure, which they partly absorb again by the same organs, while 
the greatest part of their supply is pumped up through their 
widely ramifying roots from considerable depths in the ground. 
Thus a constant evaporation is produced, which keeps the 
forest atmosphere moist even in long droughts, when all other 
sources of humidity in the forest itself are dried up. * * * 

Little is required to compel the stratum of air resting upon a 
wood to give up its moisture, which thus, as rain, fog, or dew, 
is returned to the forest. * * * The warm, moist currents 


* Der Wald , p. 13. 


188 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON PRECIPITATION. 

of air which come from other regions are cooled as they ap¬ 
proach the wood by its less heated atmosphere, and obliged to 
let fall the humidity with which they are charged. The woods 
contribute to the same effect by mechanically impeding the 
motion of fog and rain cloud, whose particles are thus accumu¬ 
lated and condensed to rain. The forest thus has a greater 
power than the open ground to retain within its own limits 
already existing humidity, and to preserve it, and it attracts 
and collects that which the wind brings it from elsewhere, and 
forces it to deposit itself as rain or other precipitation. * * * 
In consequence of these relations of the forest to humidity, it 
follows that wooded districts have both more frequent and 
more abundant rain, and in general are more humid, than 
woodless regions ; for what is true of the woods themselves, in 
this respect, is true also of their treeless neighborhood, which, 
in consequence of the ready mobility of the air and its constant 
changes, receive a share of the characteristics of the forest 
atmosphere, coolness and moisture. * * * When the dis¬ 

tricts stripped of trees have long been deprived of rain and 
dew, * * * and the grass and the fruits of the field are 

ready to wither, the grounds which are surrounded by woods 
are green and flourishing. By night they are refreshed with 
dew, which is never wanting in the moist air of the forest, and 
in due season they are watered by a beneficent shower, or a 
mist which rolls slowly over them.” * 

Asbjornsen, after adducing the familiar theoretical argu¬ 
ments on this point, adds: “ The rainless territory in Peru 
and North Africa establish this conclusion, and numerous 
other examples show that woods exert an influence in pro¬ 
ducing rain, and that rain fails where they are wanting; for 
many countries have, by the destruction of the forests, been 
deprived of rain, moisture, springs, and watercourses, which 
are necessary for vegetable growth. * * * The narratives 
of travellers show the deplorable consequences of felling 
the woods in the Island of Trinidad, Martinique, San Do- 


* Om Slovene og deres Forhold til Nationalceconomien , pp. 131 - 133 . 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON PRECIPITATION. 189 

mingo, and indeed, in almost the entire West Indian group. 

In Palestine and many other parts of Asia and 
Northern Africa, which in ancient times were the granaries 
of Europe, fertile and populous, similar consequences have 
been experienced. These lands are now deserts, and it is 
the destruction of the forests alone which has produced this 
desolation. * * * In Southern France, many districts have, 
from the same cause, become barren wastes of stone, and the 
cultivation of the vine and the olive has suffered severely since 
the baring of the neighboring mountains. Since the extensive 
clearings between the Spree and the Oder, the inhabitants 
complain that the clover crop is much less productive than 
before. On the other hand, examples of the beneficial influ¬ 
ence of planting and restoring the woods are not wanting. In 
Scotland, where many miles square have been planted with 
trees, this effect has been manifest, and similar observations 
have been made in several places in Southern France. In 
Lower Egypt, both at Cairo and near Alexandria, rain rarely 
fell in considerable quantity—for example, during the French 
occupation of Egypt, about 1798, it did not rain for sixteen 
months—but since Mehemet Aali and Ibrahim Pacha executed 
their vast plantations (the former alone having planted more 
than twenty millions of olive and fig trees, cottonwood, 
oranges, acacias, planes, &c.), there now falls a good deal of 
rain, especially along the coast, in the months of November, 
December, and January; and even at Cairo it rains both 
oftener and more abundantly,' so that real showers are no 
rarity.” * 

Babinet, in one of his lectures,f cites the supposed fact of 
the increase of rain in Egypt in consequence of the planting 
of trees, and thus remarks upon it: “ A few years ago it 
never rained in Lower Egypt. The constant north winds, 
which almost exclusively prevail there, passed without obstruc¬ 
tion over a surface bare of vegetation. Grain was kept on 

* Om Slovene og om et ordnet SJcovbrug i Norge ) p. 106. 

t Etudes et Lectures , iv. p. 114. 


190 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOKEST ON PRECIPITATION. 


the roofs in Alexandria, without being covered or otherwise 
protected from injury by the atmosphere ; but since the mak¬ 
ing of plantations, an obstacle has been created which retards 
the current of air from the north. The air thus checked, accu¬ 
mulates, dilates, cools, and yields rain.* The forests of the 

* The supposed increase in the frequency and quantity of rain in Lower 
Egypt is by no means established. I have heard it disputed on the spot 
by intelligent Franks, whose residence in that country began before the 
plantations of Mehemet Aali and Ibrahim Pacha, and I have been assured 
by them that meteorological observations, made at Alexandria about the 
beginning of this century, show an annual fall of rain as great as is usual 
at this day. The mere fact, that it did not rain during the French occu¬ 
pation, is not conclusive. Having experienced a gentle shower of nearly 
twenty-four hours’ duration in Upper Egypt, I inquired of the local gov¬ 
ernor in relation to the frequency of this phenomenon, and was told by 
him that not a drop of rain had fallen at that point for more than two 
years previous. 

The belief in the increase of rain in Egypt rests almost entirely on the 
observations of Marshal Marmont, and the evidence collected by him in 
1836. His conclusions have been disputed, if not confuted, by Jomard 
and others, and are probably erroneous. See, Foissao, Meteorologie , Ger¬ 
man translation, pp. 634-639. 

It certainly sometimes rains briskly at Cairo, but evaporation is exceed¬ 
ingly rapid in Egypt—as any one, who ever saw a Fellah woman wash a 
napkin in the Kile, and dry it by shaking it a few moments in the air, can 
testify; and a heap of grain, wet a few inches below the surface, would 
probably dry again without injury. At any rate, the Egyptian Govern¬ 
ment often has vast quantities of wheat stored at Boulak, in uncovered 
yards through the winter, though it must be admitted that the slovenliness 
and want of foresight in Oriental life, public and private, are such that we 
cannot infer the safety of any practice followed in the East, merely from 
its long continuance. 

Grain, however, may be long kept in the open air in climates much 
less dry than that of Egypt, without injury, except to the superficial 
layers; for moisture does not penetrate to a great depth in a heap of grain 
once well dried, and kept well aired. When Louis IX was making his 
preparations for his campaign in the East, he had large quantities of wine 
and grain purchased in the Island of Cyprus, and stored up, for two years, 
to await his arrival. “ When we were come to Cyprus,” says Joinville, 
Histoire de Saint Louis, § § 72, 73, “ we found there greate foison of the 
Kynge’s purveyance. * * The wheate and the barley they had piled 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON PRECIPITATION. 191 

Yosges and Ardennes produce the same effects in the north¬ 
east of France, and send us a great river, the Meuse, which is 
as remarkable for its volume as for the small extent of its 
basin. With respect to the retardation of the atmospheric 
currents, and the effects of that retardation, one of my illus¬ 
trious colleagues, M. Mignet, who is not less a profound 
thinker than an eloquent writer, suggested to me that, to pro¬ 
duce rain, a forest was as good as a mountain, and this is 
literally true.” 

Monestier-Savignat arrives at this conclusion : “ Forests on 
the one hand diminish evaporation ; on the other, they act on 
the atmosphere as refrigerating causes. The second scale of 
the balance predominates over the other, for it is established 
that in wooded countries it rains oftener, and that, the quan¬ 
tity of rain being equal, they are more humid.” * 

Boussingault—whose observations on the drying up of 
lakes and springs, from the destruction of the woods, in trop¬ 
ical America, have often been cited as a conclusive proof that 
the quantity of rain was thereby diminished—after examining 
the question with much care, remarks : “ In my judgment it 
is settled that very large clearings must diminish the annual 
fall of rain in a country ; ” and on a subsequent page, he con¬ 
cludes that, u arguing from meteorological facts collected in 
the equinoctial regions, there is reason to presume that clear¬ 
ings diminish the annual fall of rain.” f 

The same eminent author proposes series of observations on 
the level of natural lakes, especially on those without outlet, 
as a means of determining the increase or diminution of pre¬ 
cipitation in their basins, and, of course, of measuring the 

up in greate heapes in the feeldes, and to looke vpon, they were like vnto 
mountaynes; for the raine, the whyche hadde beaten vpon the wheate now 
a longe whyle, had made it to sproute on the toppe, so that it seemed as 
greene grasse. And whanne they were mynded to carrie it to Egypte, 
they brake that sod of greene herbe, and dyd finde under the same the 
wheate and the barley, as freshe as yf menne hadde butnowe thrashed it.” 
* &tude sur les Ecolx au point de vue des Inondations , p. 91. 
t Economie Rurale , ii, chap, xx, § 4, pp. 756-759. See also p. 733. 


192 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON PRECIPITATION. 

effect of clearing when sucli operations take place within those 
basins. But it must be observed that lakes without a visible 
outlet are of very rare occurrence, and besides, where no 
superficial conduit for the discharge of lacustrine waters exists, 
we can seldom or never be sure that nature has not provided 
subterranean channels for their escape. Indeed, w T hen we 
consider that most earths, and even some rocks under great 
hydrostatic pressure, are freely permeable by water, and that 
fissures are frequent in almost all rocky strata, it is evident 
that we cannot know in what proportion the depression of the 
level of a lake is to be ascribed to infiltration, to percolation, 
or to evaporation.* Further, we are, in general, as little able 
to affirm that a given lake derives all its water from the fall 
of rain within its geographical basin, or that it receives all the 
water that falls in that basin except what evaporates from the 
ground, as we are to show that all its superfluous w T ater is 
carried off by visible channels and by evaporation. 

Suppose the strata of the mountains on two sides of a lake, 
east and west, to be tilted in the same direction, and that those 
of the hill on the east side incline toward the lake, those of 
that on the west side from it. In this case a large proportion 
of the rain which falls on the eastern slope of the eastern hill 
may find its way between the strata to the lake, and an equally 
large proportion of the precipitation upon the eastern slope of 
the western ridge may escape out of the basin by similar chan¬ 
nels. In such case the clearing of the outer slopes of either 
or both mountains, while the forests of the inner declivities 
remained intact, might affect the quantity of water received by 
the lake, and it would always be impossible to know to what 
territorial extent influences thus affecting the level of a lake 

* Jacini, speaking of the great Italian lakes, says: “ A large proportion 
of the water of the lakes, instead of discharging itself by the Ticino, the 
Adda, the Oglio, the Mincio, filters through the silicious strata which 
underlie the hills, and follows subterranean channels to the plain, where 
it collects in the fontanili, and being thence conducted into the canals of 
irrigation, becomes a source of great fertility .”—La Proprietd Fondiaria , 
etc., p. 144:. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON PRECIPITATION. 


193 


might reach. Boussingault admits that extensive clearing 
beloiv an alpine lake, even at a considerable distance, might 
affect the level of its waters. How it would produce this 
influence he does not inform us, but, as he says nothing of the 
natural subterranean drainage of surface waters, it is to be 
presumed that he refers to the supposed diminution of the 
quantity of rain from the removal of the forest, which might 
manifest itself at a point more elevated than the cause which 
occasioned it. The elevation or depression of the level of nat¬ 
ural lakes, then, cannot be relied upon as a proof, still less as a 
measure of an increase or diminution in the fall of rain within 
their geographical basins, resulting from the felling of the 
woods which covered them; though such phenomena afford 
very strong presumptive evidence that the supply of water is 
somehow augmented or lessened. The supply is, in most 
cases, derived much less from the precipitation which falls 
directly upon the surface of lakes, than from waters which 
flow above or under the ground around them, and which, in 
the latter case, often come from districts not comprised within 
what superficial geography would regard as belonging to the 
lake basins. 

It is, upon the whole, evident that the question can hardly 
be determined except by the comparison of pluviometrical 
observations made at a given station before and after the de¬ 
struction of the woods. Such observations, unhappily, are 
scarcely to be found, and the opportunity for making them is 
rapidly passing away, except so far as a converse series might 
be collected in countries—France, for example—where forest 
plantation is now going on upon a large scale. The Smith¬ 
sonian Institution at Washington is well situated for directing 
the attention of observers in the newer territory of the United 
States to this subject, and it is to be hoped that it will not fail 
to avail itself of its facilities for this purpose. 

Numerous other authorities might be cited in support of 
the proposition that forests tend, at least in certain latitudes 
and at certain seasons, to produce rain ; but though the argu¬ 
ments of the advocates of this doctrine are very plausible, not 

13 


194 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON PRECIPITATION. 

to say convincing, their opinions are rather d priori conclusions 
from general meteorological laws, than deductions from facts 
of observation, and it is remarkable that there is so little direct 
evidence on the subject. 

On the other hand, Foissac expresses the opinion that 
forests have no influence on precipitation, beyond that of pro¬ 
moting the deposit of dew in their vicinity, and he states, as a 
fact of experience, that the planting of large vegetables, and 
especially of trees, is a very efficient means of drying morasses, 
because the plants draw from the earth a quantity of water 
larger than the average annual fall of rain.* Kloden, admit¬ 
ting that the rivers Oder and Elbe have diminished in quan¬ 
tity of water, the former since 1778, the latter since 1828, 
denies that the diminution of volume is to be ascribed to a 
decrease of precipitation in consequence of the felling of the 
forests, and states, what other physicists confirm, that, during 
the same period, meteorological records in various parts of 
Europe show rather an augmentation than a reduction of 
rain.f 

The observations of Belgrand tend to show, contrary to the 
general opinion, that less rain falls in wooded than in denuded 
districts. He compared the precipitation for the year 1852, at 
Yezelay in the valley of the Bouchat, and at Avallon in the 
valley of the Grenetiere. At the first of these places it w r as 
881 millimetres, at the latter 581 millimetres. The two cities 
are not more than eight miles apart. They are at the same 
altitude, and it is stated that the only difference in their geo¬ 
graphical conditions consists in the different proportions of 
forest and cultivated country around them, the basin of the 
Bouchat being entirely bare, while that of the Grenetiere is 
well wooded.^: Observations in the same valleys, considered 

* Meteorologies German translation by Emsmann, p. 605. 

t Handbuch der Physischen Geographies p. 658. 

X Annales des Fonts et Chaussees , 1854, 1st semestre, pp. 21 et seqq. 
See the comments of Valles on these observations, in his fitudes sur les 
InondationSs pp. 441 et seqq. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON PRECIPITATION. 


195 


with reference to the seasons, show the following pluviometric 
l’esults: 

FOE LA GRENETIERE. 


February, 1852, . 
November, “ 
January, 1853, . 

Total, . . 


42.2 millimetres precipitation. 
28.8 “ “ 

35.4 “ “ 


106.4 in three cold months. 


September, 1851, . 
May, 1852, . 
June, “ 

July, “ 

September, “ 


27.1 millimetres precipitation. 


20.9 

56.3 

22.8 

22.8 


u 

u 

u 


Total, . . 


. 149.9 in five warm months. 


FOR LE BOTJCHAT. 


February, 1852, . 
November, “ 
January, 1853, . 

Total, , . 


51.3 millimetres precipitation. 
36.6 “ “ 

92.0 “ “ 


179.9 in three cold months. 


September, 1851, . 
May, 1852, . 
June, “ 

July, “ 

September, “ 


43.8 

millimetres precipitation. 

13.2 

tt 

tt 

55.5 

u 

u 

19.5 

a 

u 

26.5 

it 

u 


Total, 


158.5 in five warm months. 


These observations, so far as they go, seem to show that 
more rain falls in cleared than in wooded countries, bnt this 
result is so contrary to what has been generally accepted as a 
theoretical conclusion, that further experiment is required to 
determine the question. 

Becquerel—whose treatise on the climatic effects of the 
destruction of the forest is the fullest general discussion of that 
subject known to me—does not examine this particular point, 
and as, in the summary of the results of his investigations, he 
does not ascribe to the forest any influence upon precipitation, 
the presumption is that he rejects the doctrine of its import¬ 
ance as an agent in producing the fall of rain. 















196 ACTION OF THE FOREST ON THE SOIL. 

The effect of the forest on precipitation, then, is not entirely 
free from doubt, and we cannot positively affirm that the total 
annual quantity of rain is diminished or increased by the de¬ 
struction of the woods, though both theoretical considerations 
and the balance of testimony strongly favor the opinion that 
more rain falls in wooded than in open countries. One im¬ 
portant conclusion, at least, upon the meteorological influence 
of forests is certain and undisputed : the proposition, namely, 
that, within their own limits, and near their own borders, 
they maintain a more uniform degree of humidity in the 
atmosphere than is observed in cleared grounds. Scarcely 
less can it be questioned that they promote the frequency of 
showers, and, if they do not augment the amount of precip¬ 
itation, they equalize its distribution through the different 
seasons. 

Influence of the Forest on the Humidity of the Soil. 

I have hitherto confined myself to the influence of the 
forest on meteorological conditions, a subject, as has been seen, 
full of difficulty and uncertainty. Its comparative effects on 
the temperature, the humidity, the texture, and consistence, 
the configuration and distribution of the mould or arable soil, 
and, very often, of the mineral strata below, and on the per¬ 
manence and regularity of springs and greater superficial 
watercourses, are much less disputable, and more easily esti¬ 
mated, and much more important, than its possible value as a 
cause of strictly climatic equilibrium or disturbance. 

The action of the forest on the earth is chiefly mechanical, 
but the organic process of abstraction of water by its roots 
affects the quantity of that fluid contained in the vegetable 
mould, and in the mineral strata near the surface, and, conse¬ 
quently, the consistency of the soil. In treating of the effects 
of trees on the moisture of the atmosphere, I have said that the 
forest, by interposing a canopy between the sky and the 
ground, and by covering the surface with a thick mantle of 
fallen leaves, at once obstructed insolation and prevented the 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


197 


radiation of heat from the earth. These influences go far to 
balance each other; but familiar observation shows that, in 
summer, the forest soil is not raised to so high a temperature 
as open grounds exposed to irradiation. For this reason, and 
in consequence of the mechanical resistance opposed by the 
bed of dead leaves to the escape of moisture, w r e should expect 
that, except after recent rains, the superficial strata of wood¬ 
land soil would be more humid than that of cleared land. 
This agrees with experience. The soil of the forest is always 
moist, except in the extremest droughts, and it is exceedingly 
rare that a primitive wood suffers from want of humidity. 
How far this accumulation of water affects the condition of 
neighboring grounds by lateral infiltration, we do not know, 
but we shall see, in a subsequent chapter, that water is con¬ 
veyed to great distances by this process, and we may hence 
infer that the influence in question is an important one. 

Influence of the Forest on the Flow of Springs. 

It is well established that the protection afforded by the 
forest against the escape of moisture from its soil, insures the 
permanence and regularity of natural springs, not only within 
the limits of the wood, but at some distance beyond their bor¬ 
ders, and thus contributes to the supply of an element essen¬ 
tial to both vegetable and animal life. As the forests are 
destroyed, the springs which flowed from the woods, and, con¬ 
sequently, the greater watercourses fed by them, diminish 
both in number and in volume. This fact is so familiar 
throughout the American States and the British Provinces, 
that there are few old residents of the interior of those districts 
who are not able to testify to its truth as a matter of personal 
observation. My own recollection suggests to me many in¬ 
stances of this sort, and I remember one case where a small 
mountain spring, which disappeared soon after the clearing of 
the ground where it rose, was recovered about ten or twelve 
years ago, by simply allowing the bushes and young trees to 
grow up on a rocky knoll, not more than half an acie in 


198 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


extent, immediately above it, and has since continued to flow 
uninterruptedly. The uplands in the Atlantic States formerly 
abounded in sources and rills, but in many parts of those 
States which have been cleared for above a generation or two, 
the hill pastures now suffer severely from drought, and in dry 
seasons no longer afford either water or herbage for cattle. 

Foissac, indeed, quotes from the elder Pliny (Nat. Hist ., 
xxxi, c. 30) a passage affirming that the felling of the woods 
gives rise to springs which did not exist before because the 
water of the soil was absorbed by the trees; and the same 
meteorologist declares, as I observed in treating of the effect 
of the forest on atmospheric humidity, that the planting of 
trees tends to drain marshy ground, because the roots absorb 
more water than falls from the air. But Pliny’s statement 
rests on very doubtful authority, and Foissac cites no evidence 
in support of his own proposition.* In the American States, 
it is always observed that clearing the ground not only causes 
running springs to disappear, but dries up the stagnant pools 
and the spongy soils of the low grounds. The first roads in 
those States ran along the ridges, when practicable, because 
there only was the earth dry enough to allow of their construc¬ 
tion, and, for the same reason, the cabins of the first settlers 
were perched upon the hills. As the forests have been from 
time to time removed, and the face of the earth laid open to 
the air and sun, the moisture has been evaporated, and the 
removal of the highways and of human habitations from the 
bleak hills to the sheltered valleys, is one of the most agree- 

/ 

* The passage in Pliny is as follows: “Nascuntur fontes, decisis 
plerumque silvis, quos arborum alimenta consumebant, sicut in Hsemo, 
obsidente Gallos Cassandro, qunm valli gratia cecidissent. Plerumque 
vero damnosi torrentes corrivantur, detracta collibus silva continere 
nimbos ac digerere consueta.”— Nat. Hist., xxxi, 30. 

Seneca cites this case, and another similar one said to have been ob¬ 
served at Magnesia, from a passage in Theophrastus, not to be found in the 
extant works of that author; but he adds that the stories are incredible, 
because shaded grounds abound most in water: fer& aquosissima sunt 
quaecumque umbrosissima.— Qucest. Nat., iii, 11. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


199 


able among the many improvements which later generations 
have witnessed in the interior of New England and the other 
Northern States. 

Almost every treatise on the economy of the forest adduces 
numerous facts in support of the doctrine that the clearing of 
the woods tends to diminish the flow of springs and the hu¬ 
midity of the soil, and it might seem unnecessary to bring 
forward further evidence on this point.* But the subject is of 
too much practical importance and of too great philosophical 
interest to be summarily disposed of; and it ought particu¬ 
larly to be noticed that there is at least one case—that of some 
loose soils which, when bared of wood, very rapidly absorb 
and transmit to lower strata the water they receive from the 
atmosphere, as argued by Yalles f—where the removal of the 
forest may increase the flow of springs at levels below it, by 
exposing to the rain and melted snow a surface more bibulous, 
and at the same time less retentive, than its original covering. 
Under such circumstances, the water of precipitation, which 
had formerly flowed off without penetrating through the super¬ 
ficial layers of leaves upon the ground—as, in very heavy 
showers, it sometimes does—or been absorbed by the vegetable 
mould and retained until it was evaporated, might descend 
through porous earth until it meets an impermeable stratum, 
and then be conducted along it, until, finally, at the outcrop- 

* “ Why go so far for the proof of a phenomenon that is repeated every 
day under our own eyes, and of which every Parisian may convince him¬ 
self, without venturing beyond the Bois de Boulogne or the forest of 
Meudon ? Let him, after a few rainy days, pass along the Chevreuse road, 
which is bordered on the right by the wood, on the left by cultivated 
fields. The fall of water and the continuance of the rain have been the same 
on both sides; but the ditch on the side of the forest will remain filled 
with water proceeding from the infiltration through the wooded soil, 
long after the other, contiguous to the open ground, has performed its 
office of drainage and become dry. The ditch on the left will have dis¬ 
charged in a few hours a quantity of water, which the ditch on the right 
requires several days to receive and carry down to the valley.”— Clave, 

fttudes, etc., pp. 53, 54. 

t Yalles, Etudes sur les Inondations , p. 472. 


200 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 

ping of this stratum, it bursts from a hillside as a running 
spring. But such instances are doubtless too rare to form a 
frequent or an important exception to the general law, because 
it is only under very uncommon circumstances that rain water 
runs off over the surface of forest ground instead of sinking 
into it, and very rarely the case that such a soil as has just 
been supposed is covered by a layer of vegetable earth thick 
enough to retain, until it is evaporated, all the rain that falls 
upon it, without imparting any water to the strata below it. 

If we look at the point under discussion as purely a ques¬ 
tion of fact, to be determined by positive evidence and not by 
argument, the observations of Boussingault are, both in the 
circumstances they detail, and in the weight of authority to 
be attached to the testimony, among the most important yet 
recorded. They are embodied in the fourth section of the 
twentieth chapter of that writer’s ficonomie Hurdle , and I have 
already referred to them on page 191 for another purpose. 
The interest of the question will justify me in giving, in Bous- 
singault’s own words, the facts and some of the remarks with 
which he accompanies the details of them: “In many local¬ 
ities,” he observes,* “ it has been thought that, within a certain 
number of years, a sensible diminution has been perceived in 
the volume of water of streams utilized as a motive power; 
at other points, there are grounds for believing that rivers 
have become shallower, and the increasing breadth of the belt 
of pebbles along their banks seems to prove the loss of a part 
of their water; and, finally, abundant springs have almost 
dried up. These observations have been principally made in 
valleys bounded by high mountains, and it is thought to have 
been noticed that this diminution of the waters has imme¬ 
diately followed the epoch when the inhabitants have begun 
to destroy, unsparingly, the woods which were spread over the 
face of the land. 

“These facts would indicate that, where clearings have 
been made, it rains less than formerly, and this is the gener- 


* Economie Rurale , p. 730. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


201 


ally received opinion. * * * But while the facts I have 

stated have been established, it has been observed, at the same 
time, that, since the clearing of the mountains, the rivers and 
the torrents, which seemed to have lost a part of their water, 
sometimes suddenly swell, and that, occasionally, to a degree 
which causes great disasters. Besides, after violent storms, 
springs which had become almost exhausted have been ob¬ 
served to burst out with impetuosity, and soon after to dry up 
again. These latter observations, it will be easily conceived, 
warn us not to admit hastily the common opinion that the 
felling of the woods lessens the quantity of rain ; for not only 
is it very possible that the quantity of rain has not changed, 
but the mean volume of running water may have remained 
the same, in spite of the appearance of drought presented by 
the rivers and springs, at certain periods of the year. Perhaps 
the only difference would be that the flow of the same quantity 
of water becomes more irregular in consequence of clearing. 
For instance : if the low water of the Phone during one part 
of the year were exactly compensated by a sufficient number 
of floods, it would follow that this river would convey to the 
Mediterranean the same volume of water which it carried to 
that sea in ancient times, before the period when the countries 
near its source were stripped of their woods, and when, prob¬ 
ably, its mean depth was not subject to so great variations as 
in our days. If this were so, the forests would have this value 
—that of regulating, of economizing in a certain sort, the 
drainage of the rain water. 

“ If running streams really become rarer in proportion as 
clearing is extended, it follows either that the rain is less abun¬ 
dant, or that evaporation is greatly favored by a surface which 
is no longer protected by trees against the rays of the sun and 
the wind. These two causes, acting in the same direction, 
must often be cumulative in their effects, and before we at¬ 
tempt to fix the value of each, it is proper to inquire whether 
it is an established fact that running waters diminish on the 
surface of a country in which extensive clearing is going on ; 
in a word, to examine whether an apparent fact has not been 


202 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 

mistaken for a real one. And liere lies tlie practical point of 
the question ; for if it is once established that clearing dimin¬ 
ishes the volume of streams, it is less important to know to what 
special cause this effect is due. * * * I shall attach no 

value except to facts which have taken place under the eye of 
man, as it is the influence of his labors on the meteorological 
condition of the atmosphere which I propose to estimate. 
What I am about to detail has been observed particularly in 
America, but I shall endeavor to establish, that what I believe 
to be true of America would be equally so for any other con¬ 
tinent. 

“ One of the most interesting parts of Venezuela is, no 
doubt, the valley of Aragua. Situated at a short distance from 
the coast, and endowed, from its elevation, with various cli¬ 
mates and a soil of unexampled fertility, its agriculture em¬ 
braces at once the crops suited to tropical regions and to 
Europe. Wheat succeeds well on the heights of Victoria. 
Bounded on the north by the coast chain, on the south by a 
system of mountains connected with the Llanos, the valley is 
shut in on the east and the west by lines of hills which com¬ 
pletely close it. In consequence of this singular configuration, 
the rivers which rise within it, having no outlet to the ocean, 
form, by their union, the beautiful Lake of Tacarigua or Valen¬ 
cia. This lake, according to Humboldt, is larger than that of 
Neufchatel; it is at an elevation of 439 metres [= 1,460 
English feet] above the sea, and its greatest length does not 
exceed two leagues and a half [= seven English miles]. 

“ At the time of Humboldt’s visit to the valley of Aragua, 
the inhabitants were struck by the gradual diminution w T hich 
the lake had been undergoing for thirty years. In fact, by 
comparing the descriptions given by historians with its actual 
condition, even making large allowance for exaggeration, it 
was easy to see that the level was considerably depressed. 
The facts spoke for themselves. Oviedo, who, toward the 
close of the sixteenth century, had often traversed the valley 
of Aragua, says positively that New Valencia was founded, in 
1555, at half a league from the Lake of Tacarigua; in 1800, 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 203 

Humboldt found this city 5,260 metres [= 3^ English miles] 
from the shore. 

“ The aspect of the soil furnished new proofs. Many hil¬ 
locks on the plain retain the name of islands, which they more 
justly bore when they were surrounded by water. The ground 
laid bare by the retreat of the lake was converted into admi¬ 
rable plantations of cotton, bananas, and sugar cane; and build¬ 
ings erected near the lake showed the sinking of the water 
from year to year. In 1796, new islands made their appear¬ 
ance. An important military point, a fortress built in 1740 on 
the island of Cabrera, was now on a peninsula; and, finally, 
on two granitic islands, those of Cura and Cabo Blanco, Hum¬ 
boldt observed among the shrubs, some metres above the 
water, fine sand filled with helicites. 

u These clear and positive facts suggested numerous expla¬ 
nations, all assuming a subterranean outlet, which permitted 
the discharge of the water to the ocean. Humboldt disposed 
of these hypotheses, and, after a careful examination of the 
locality, the distinguished traveller did not hesitate to ascribe 
the diminution of the waters of the lake to the numerous clear¬ 
ings which had been made in the valley of Aragua within half 
a century. * * * 

“ In 1800, the valley of Aragua possessed a population as 
dense as that of any of the best-peopled parts of France. 
* * * Such was the prosperous condition of this fine coun¬ 

try when Humboldt occupied the Hacienda de Cura. 

“ Twenty-two years later, I explored the valley of Aragua, 
fixing my residence in the little town of Maracay. For some 
years previous, the inhabitants had observed that the waters 
of the lake were no longer retiring, but, on the contrary, were 
sensibly rising. Grounds, not long before occupied by planta¬ 
tions, were submerged. The islands of Huevas Aparecidas, 
which appeared above the surface in 1796, had again become 
shoals dangerous to navigation. Cabrera, a tongue of land on 
the north side of the valley, was so narrow that the least rise 
of the water completely inundated it. A protracted north 
wind sufficed to flood the road between Maracay and Hew 


204 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 

Valencia. The fears which the inhabitants of the shores had 
so long entertained were reversed. * * * Those who had 

explained the diminution of the lake by the supposition ot sub¬ 
terranean channels were suspected of blocking them up, to 
prove themselves in the right. 

“ During the twenty-two years which had elapsed, import¬ 
ant political events had occurred. Venezuela no longer be¬ 
longed to Spain. The peaceful valley of Aragua had been the 
theatre of bloody struggles, and a war of extermination had 
desolated these smiling lands and decimated their population. 
At the first cry of independence a great number of slaves 
found their liberty by enlisting under the banners of the new 
republic; the great plantations were abandoned, and the forest, 
which, in the tropics so rapidly encroaches, had soon recovered 
a large proportion of the soil which man had wrested from 
it by more than a century of constant and painful labor. 

u At the time of the growing prosperity of the valley of 
Aragua, the principal affluents of the lake were diverted, to 
serve for irrigation, and the rivers were dry for more than six 
months of the year. At the period of my visit, their waters, 
no longer employed, flowed freely.” 

Boussingault proceeds to state that two lakes near Ubate 
in New Granada, at an elevation of 2,562 metres (= 8,500 
English feet), where there is a constant temperature of 14° to 
16° centigrade [ — 57°, 61° Fahrenheit], had formed but one, 
a century before his visit; that the waters were gradually 
retiring, and the plantations extending over the abandoned 
bed; that, by inquiry of old hunters and by examination of 
parish records, he found that extensive clearings had been 
made and were still going on. 

He found, also, that the length of the Lake of Fuquene, in 
the same valley, had, within two centuries, been reduced from 
ten leagues to one and a half, its breadth from three leagues to 
one. At the former period, timber was abundant, and the 
neighboring mountains were covered, to a certain height, with 
American oaks, laurels, and other trees of indigenous species ; 
but at the time of his visit the mountains had been almost 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


205 


entirely stripped of their wood, chiefly to furnish fuel for salt¬ 
works. Our author adds that other cases, similar to those 
already detailed, might be cited, and he proceeds to show, by 
several examples, that the waters of other lakes in the same 
regions, where the valleys had always been bare of wood, or 
where the forests had not been disturbed, had undergone no 
change of level. 

Boussingault further maintains that the lakes of Switzer¬ 
land have sustained a depression of level since the too prevalent 
destruction of the woods, and arrives at the general conclusion, 
that, “ in countries where great clearings have been made, 
there has most probably been a diminution in the living waters 
which flow upon the surface of the ground.” This conclusion 
he further supports by two examples: one, where a fine spring, 
at the foot of a wooded mountain in the Island of Ascension, 
dried up when the mountain was cleared, but reappeared when 
the wood was replanted; the other at Marmato, in the province 
of Popayan, where the streams employed to drive machinery 
were much diminished in volume, within two years after the 
clearing of the heights from which they derived their supplies. 
This latter is an interesting case, because, although the rain 
gauges, established as soon as the decrease of water began to 
excite alarm, showed a greater fall of rain for the second year 
of observation than the first, yet there was no appreciable 
increase in the flow of the mill streams. From these cases, the 
distinguished physicist infers that very restricted local clear¬ 
ings may diminish and even suppress springs and brooks, 
without any reduction in the total quantity of rain. 

It will have been noticed that these observations, with the 
exception of the last two cases, do not bear directly upon the 
question of the diminution of springs by clearings, but they 
logically infer it from the subsidence of the natural reservoirs 
which springs once filled. There is, however, no want of posi¬ 
tive evidence on this subject. 

Marschand cites the following instances : “ Before the fell¬ 
ing of the woods, within the last few years, in the valley of the 
Soulce, the Combe-^s-Mounin and the Little Valley, the Some 


206 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 

furnished a regular and sufficient supply of water for the iron 
works of Unterwyl, which was almost unaffected by drought 
or by heavy rains. The Some has now become a torrent, 
every shower occasions a flood, and after a few days of fine 
weather, the current falls so low that it has been necessary to 
change the water wheels, because those of the old construction 
are no longer able to drive the machinery, and at last to intro¬ 
duce a steam engine to prevent the stoppage of the works for 
want of water. 

“When the factory of St. Ursanne was established, the 
river that furnished its power was abundant, long known and 
tried, and had, from time immemorial, sufficed for the ma¬ 
chinery of a previous factory. Afterward, the woods near its 
sources were cut. The supply of water fell off in consequence, 
the factory wanted water for half the year, and was at last 
obliged to stop altogether. 

“ The spring of Combefoulat, in the commune of Seleate, 
was well known as one of the best in the country; it was 
remarkably abundant and sufficient, in spite of the severest 
droughts, to supply all the fountains of the town ; but, as soon 
as considerable forests were felled in Combe-de-pre Martin and 
in the valley of Combefoulat, the famous spring which lies 
below these woods has become a mere thread of water, and 
disappears altogether in times of drought. 

“ The spring of Varieux, which formerly supplied the castle 
of Pruntrut, lost more than half its water after the clearing of 
Varieux and Pougeoles. These woods have been replanted, 
the young trees are growing well, and with the woods, the 
waters of the spring are increasing. 

“ The Dog Spring between Pruntrut and Bressancourt has 
entirely vanished since the surrounding forests grounds were 
brought under cultivation. 

“ The Wolf Spring, in the commune of Soubey, furnishes a 
remarkable example of the influence of the woods upon foun¬ 
tains. A few years ago this spring did not exist. At the 
place where it now rises, a small thread of water was observed 
after very long rains, but the stream disappeared with the rain. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 207 

The spot is in the middle of a very steep pasture inclining to 
the south. Eighty years ago, the owner of the land, perceiv¬ 
ing that young firs were shooting up in the upper part of it, 
determined to let them grow, and they soon formed a flourish¬ 
ing grove. As soon as they were well grown, a fine spring 
appeared in place of the occasional rill, and furnished abun¬ 
dant water in the longest droughts. For forty or fifty years, 
this spring was considered the best in the Clos du Doubs. A 
few years since, the grove was felled, and the ground turned 
again to a pasture. The spring disappeared with the wood, 
and is now as dry as it was ninety years ago.” * 

“ The influence of the forest on springs,” says Hummel, 
ct is strikingly shown by an instance at Heilbronn. The woods 
on the hills surrounding the town are cut in regular succession 
every twentieth year. As the annual cuttings approach a cer¬ 
tain point, the springs yield less water, some of them none at 
all; but as the young growth shoots up, they flow more and 
more freely, and at length bubble up again in all their original 
abundance.” f 

Piper states the following case : “ Within about half a mile 
of my residence there is a pond upon which mills have been 
standing for a long time, dating back, I believe, to the first 
settlement of the town. These have been kept in constant 
operation until within some twenty or thirty years, when the 
supply of water began to fail. The pond owes its existence to 
a stream which has its source in the hills which stretch some 
miles to the south. Within the time mentioned, these hills, 
which were clothed with a dense forest, have been almost 
entirely stripped of trees; and to the wonder and loss of the 
mill owners, the water in the pond has failed, except in the 
season of freshets; and, wEat was never heard of before, the 
stream itself has been entirely dry. Within the last ten years 
a new growth of wood has sprung up on most of the land 
formerly occupied by the old forest; and now the water runs 

* TJeber die Entwaldung dev Gebirge , pp. 20 et seqq. 

f Physische Geographic, p. 32. 


208 THE FOREST IN SUMMER AND IN WINTER. 

through the year, notwithstanding the great droughts of the 
last few years, going back from 1856.” 

Dr. Piper quotes from a letter of William C. Bryant the 
following remarks: “ It is a common observation that our 
summers are become drier, and our streams smaller. Take 
the Cuyahoga as an illustration. Fifty years ago large barges 
loaded with goods went up and down that river, and one of 
the vessels engaged in the battle of Lake Erie, in which the 
gallant Perry was victorious, was built at Old Portage, six 
miles north of Albion, and floated down to the lake. Now, in 
an ordinary stage of the water, a canoe or skiff can hardly pass 
down the stream. Many a boat of fifty tons burden has been 
built and loaded in the Tuscarawas, at Mew Portage, and 
sailed to Mew Orleans without breaking bulk. Mow, the river 
hardly affords a supply of water at Mew Portage for the canal. 
The same may be said of other streams—they are drying up. 
And from the same cause—the destruction of our forests—our 
summers are growing drier, and our winters colder.” * 

Mo observer has more carefully studied the influence of the 
forest upon the flow of the waters, or reasoned more ably on 
the ascertained phenomena than Cantegril. The facts pre¬ 
sented in the following case, communicated by him to the 
Ami des Sciences for December, 1859, are as nearly conclusive 
as any single instance well can be : 

“ In the territory of the commune of Labruguiere, there is 
a forest of 1,834 hectares [2,700 acres], known by the name of 
the Forest of Montaut, and belonging to that commune. It 
extends along the northern slope of the Black Mountains. 
The soil is granitic, the maximum altitude 1,243 metres [4,140 
feet], and the inclination ranges between 15 and 60 to 100. 

“ A small current of water, the brook of Caunan, takes its 
rise in this forest, and receives the waters of two thirds of its 
surface. At the lower extremity of the wood and on the 
stream are several fulleries, each requiring a force of eight 
horse-power to drive the water wheels which work the stamp- 


* The Trees of America, pp. 50, 51. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 209 

ers. The commune of Labrugui&re liad been for a long time 
famous for its opposition to forest laws. Trespasses and abuses 
of the right of pasturage had converted the wood into an 
immense waste, so that this vast property now scarcely sufficed 
to pay the expense of protecting it, and to furnish the inhab¬ 
itants with a meagre supply of fuel. While the forest was 
thus ruined, and the soil thus bared, the water, after every 
abundant rain, made an eruption into the valley, brought 
down a great quantity of pebbles which still clog the current 
of the Caunan. The violence of the floods was sometimes such 
that they were obliged to stop the machinery for some time. 
During the summer another inconvenience was felt. If the 
dry weather continued a little longer than usual, the delivery 
of water became insignificant. Each fullery could for the 
most part only employ a single set of stampers, and it was not 
unusual to see the work entirely suspended. 

“ From 1840, the municipal authority succeeded in en¬ 
lightening the population as to their true interests. Protected 
by a more watchful supervision, aided by well-managed re¬ 
plantation, the forest has continued to improve to the present 
day. In proportion to the restoration of the forest, the condi¬ 
tion of the manufactories has become less and less precarious, 
and the action of the water is completely modified. For 
example, there are no long, sudden, and violent floods, which 
make it necessary to stop the machinery. There is no increase 
in the delivery until six or eight hours after the beginning of 
the rain ; the floods follow a regular progression till they reach 
their maximum, and decrease in the same manner. Finally, 
the fulleries are no longer forced to suspend work in summer; 
the water is always sufficiently abundant to allow the employ¬ 
ment of two sets of stampers at least, and often even of three. 

“ This example is remarkable in this respect, that, all other 
circumstances having remained the same, the changes in the 
action of the stream can be attributed only to the restoration 
of the forest—changes which may be thus summed up : dimi¬ 
nution of flood water during rains—increase of delivery at other 
seasons.” 


14 


210 


THE FOREST IN FRANCE. 


The Forest in Winter. 

To estimate rightly the importance of the forest as a nat¬ 
ural apparatus for accumulating the water that falls upon the 
surface and transmitting it to the subjacent strata, we must 
compare the condition and properties of its soil with those of 
cleared and cultivated earth, and examine the consequently 
different action of these soils at different seasons of the year. 
The disparity between them is greatest in climates where, as 
in the Northern American States and in the North of Europe, 
the open ground freezes and remains impervious to water 
during a considerable part of the winter; though, even in 
climates where the earth does not freeze at all, the woods have 
still an important influence of the same character. The differ¬ 
ence is yet greater in countries which have regular wet and 
dry seasons, rain being very frequent in the former period, 
while, in the latter, it scarcely occurs at all. These countries 
lie chiefly in or near the tropics, but they are not wanting in 
higher latitudes; for a large part of Asiatic and even of 
European Turkey is almost wholly deprived of summer rains. 
In the principal regions occupied by European cultivation, 
and where alone the questions discussed in this volume are 
recognized as having, at present, any practical importance, 
rain falls at all seasons, and it is to these regions that, on this 
point as well as others, I chiefly confine my attention. 

The influence of the forest upon the w r aters of the earth 
has been more studied in France than in any other part of the 
civilized world, because that country has, in recent times, suf¬ 
fered most severely from the destruction of the woods. But 
in the southern provinces of that empire, where the evils 
resulting from this cause are most sensibly felt, the winters are 
not attended with much frost, while, in Northern Europe, 
where the winters are rigorous enough to freeze the ground to 
the depth of some inches, or even feet, a humid atmosphere 
and frequent summer rains prevent the drying up of the 
springs observed in southern latitudes when the woods are 
gone. For these reasons, the specific character of the forest, 


THE FOREST IN WINTER. 211 

as a winter reservoir of moisture in countries with a cold and 
dry atmosphere, has not attracted so much attention in France 
and Northern Europe as it deserves in the United States, 
where an excessive climate renders that function of the woods 
more important. 

In New England, irregular as the climate is, the first 
autumnal snows usually fall before the ground is frozen at all, 
or when the frost extends at most to the depth of only a few 
inches. In the woods, especially those situated upon the 
elevated ridges which supply the natural irrigation of the soil 
and feed the perennial fountains and streams, the ground 
remains covered with snow during the winter; for the trees 
protect the snow from blowing from the general surface into 
the depressions, and new accessions are received before the 
covering deposited by the first fall is melted. Snow is of a 
color unfavorable for radiation, but, even when it is of consid¬ 
erable thickness, it is not wdiolly impervious to the rays of the 
sun, and for this reason, as well as from the warmth of lower 
strata, the frozen crust, if one has been formed, is soon thawed, 
and does not again fall below the freezing point during the 
winter. 

The snow in contact with the earth now begins to melt, 
with greater or less rapidity, according to the relative temper¬ 
ature of the earth and the air, while the water resulting from 
its dissolution is imbibed by the vegetable mould, and carried 
off by infiltration so fast that both the snow and the layers of 
leaves in contact with it often seem comparatively dry, when, 
in fact, the under surface of the former is in a state of per¬ 
petual thaw. No doubt a certain proportion of the snow is 
returned to the atmosphere by direct evaporation, but in the 
woods it is partially protected from the action of the sun, and 
as very little water runs off in the winter by superficial water¬ 
courses, except in rare cases of sudden thaw, there can be no 
question that much the greater part of the snow deposited in 
the forest is slowly melted and absorbed by the earth. 

The quantity of snow that falls in extensive forests, far 
from the open country, has seldom been ascertained by direct 


212 


THE FOREST IN WINTER. 


observation, because there are few meteorological stations in 
such situations. In the Northeastern border States of the 
American Union, the ground in the deep woods is covered 
with snow four or five months, and the proportion of water 
which falls in snow does not exceed one fifth of the total pre¬ 
cipitation for the year.* Although, in the open grounds, snow 
and ice are evaporated with great rapidity in clear weather, 
even when the thermometer stands far below the freezing 
point, the surface of the snow in the woods does not indicate 
much loss in this way. Very small deposits of snowflakes 
remain unevaporated in the forest, for many days after snow 
let fall at the same time in the cleared field has disappeared 
without either a thaw to melt it or a wind powerful enough to 
drift it away. Even when bared of their leaves, the trees of a 
wood obstruct, in an important degree, both the direct action 
of the sun’s rays on the snow, and the movement of drying 
and thawing winds. 

Dr. Piper records the following observations: “ A body of 
snow, one foot in depth, and sixteen feet square, was protected 
from the wind by a tight board fence about five feet high, 
while another body of snow, much more sheltered from the 
sun than the first, six feet in depth, and about sixteen feet 
square, was fully exposed to the wind. When the thaw came 
on, which lasted about a fortnight, the larger body of snow 
was entirely dissolved in less than a week, while the smaller 
body was not wholly gone at the end of the second week. 

“ Equal quantities of snow were placed in vessels of the 
same kind and capacity, the temperature of the air being sev¬ 
enty degrees. In the one case, a constant current of air was 
kept passing over the open vessel, while the other was pro¬ 
tected by a cover. The snow in the first was dissolved in 
sixteen minutes, while the latter had a small unthawed propor¬ 
tion remaining at the end of eighty-five minutes.” f 

The snow in the woods is protected in the same way, 
though not literally to the same extent as by the fence in one 


* Thompson’s Vermont, appendix, p. 8. 


t Trees of America , p. 48. 


THE FOREST IN WINTER. 


213 


of these cases and the cover in the other. Little of the winter 
precipitation, therefore, is lost by evaporation, and as it slowly 
melts at bottom it is absorbed by the earth, and but a very 
small quantity of water runs off from the surface. The im¬ 
mense importance of the forest, as a reservoir of this stock of 
moisture, becomes apparent, when we consider that a large 
proportion of the summer rain either flows into the valleys 
and the rivers, because it falls faster than the ground can 
imbibe it; or, if absorbed by the warm superficial strata, is 
evaporated from them without sinking deep enough to reach 
wells and springs, which, of course, depend very much on 
winter rains and snows for their entire supply. This observa¬ 
tion, though specially true of cleared and cultivated grounds, 
is not wholly inapplicable to the forest, particularly when, as 
is too often the case in Europe, the underwood and the decay¬ 
ing leaves are removed. 

The general effect of the forest in cold climates is to assim¬ 
ilate the winter state of the ground to that of wooded regions 
under softer skies ; and it is a circumstance well worth noting, 
that in Southern Europe, where nature has denied to the earth 
a warm winter-garment of flocculent snow, she has, by one of 
those compensations in which her empire is so rich, clothed 
the hillsides with umbrella pines, ilexes, cork oaks, and other 
trees of persistent foliage, whose evergreen leaves afford to 
the soil a protection analogous to that which it derives from 
snow in more northern climates. 

The water imbibed by the soil in winter sinks until it 
meets a more or less impermeable, or a saturated stratum, and 
then, by unseen conduits, slowly finds its way to the channels 
of springs, or oozes out of the ground in drops which unite in 
rills, and so all is conveyed to the larger streams, and by them 
finally to the sea. The water, in percolating through the vege¬ 
table and mineral layers, acquires their temperature, and is 
chemically affected by their action, but it carries very little 
matter in mechanical suspension. 

The process I have described is a slow one, and the supply 
of moisture derived from the snow, augmented by the rains of 


214 


EFFECTS OF DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST. 


tlie following seasons, keeps the forest ground, where the sur^ 
face is level or bnt moderately inclined, in a state of saturation 
through almost the whole year. The rivers fed by springs and 
shaded by woods are comparatively uniform in volume, in 
temperature, and in chemical composition. Their banks are 
little abraded, nor are their courses much obstructed by fallen 
timber, or by earth and gravel washed down from the high¬ 
lands. Their channels are subject only to slow and gradual 
changes, and they carry down to the lakes and the sea no 
accumulation of sand or silt to till up their outlets, and, by 
raising their beds, to force them to spread over the low 
grounds near their mouth.* 

In this state of things, destructive tendencies of all sorts 
are arrested or compensated, and tree, bird, beast, and fish, 
alike, find a constant uniformity of condition most favorable to 
the regular and harmonious coexistence of them all. 


General Consequences of the Destruction of the Forest. 

With the disappearance of the forest, all is changed. At 
one season, the earth parts with its warmth by radiation to an 
open sky—receives, at another, an immoderate heat from the 
unobstructed rays of the sun. Hence the climate becomes 
excessive, and the soil is alternately parched by the fervors of 

* Dumont, following Dausse, gives an interesting extract from the 
Misopogon of the Emperor Julian, showing that, in the fourth century, the 
Seine—the level of which now varies to the extent of thirty feet between 
extreme high and extreme low water mark—was almost wholly exempt 
from inundations, and flowed with a uniform current through the whole 
year. “Ego olim eram in hibernis apud caram Lutetiam, [sic] enim Galli 
Parisiorum oppidum appellant, quce insula est non magna, in fluvio sita, qui 
earn omni ex parte cingit. Pontes sublieii utrinque ad earn ferunt, raroque 
fluvius minuitur ac crescit; sed qualis sestate, talis esse solet hyeme .”—Des 
Travaux Publics dans leur Rapports avec VAgriculture, p. 361, note. 

As Julian was six years in Gaul, and his principal residence was at 
Paris, his testimony as to the habitual condition of the Seine, at a period 
when the provinces where its sources originate were well wooded, is very 
valuable. 


EFFECTS OF DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST. .215 

summer, and seared by the rigors of winter. Bleak winds 
sweep unresisted over its surface, drift away the snow that 
sheltered it from the frost, and dry up its scanty moisture. 
The precipitation becomes as irregular as the temperature; the 
melting snows and vernal rains, no longer absorbed by a loose 
and bibulous vegetable mould, rush over the frozen surface, 
and pour down the valleys seaward, instead of filling a reten¬ 
tive bed of absorbent earth, and storing up a supply of moist¬ 
ure to feed perennial springs. The soil is bared of its covering 
of leaves, broken and loosened by the plough, deprived of the 
fibrous rootlets which held it together, dried and pulverized 
by sun and wind, and at last exhausted by new combinations. 
The face of the earth is no longer a sponge, but a dust heap, 
and the floods which the waters of the sky pour over it hurry 
swiftly along its slopes, carrying in suspension vast quantities 
of earthy particles which increase the abrading power and 
mechanical force of the current, and, augmented by the sand 
and gravel of falling banks, fill the beds of the streams, divert 
them into new channels and obstruct their outlets. The rivu¬ 
lets, wanting their former regularity of supply and deprived of 
the protecting shade of the woods, are heated, evaporated, and 
thus reduced in their summer currents, but swollen to raging 
torrents in autumn and in spring. From these causes, there is 
a constant degradation of the uplands, and a consequent eleva¬ 
tion of the beds of watercourses and of lakes by the deposi¬ 
tion of the mineral and vegetable matter carried down by the 
waters. The channels of great rivers become unnavigable, 
their estuaries are choked up, and harbors which once sheltered 
large navies are shoaled by dangerous sandbars. The earth, 
stripped of its vegetable glebe, grows less and less productive, 
and, consequently, less able to protect itself by weaving a new 
network of roots to bind its particles together, a new carpet¬ 
ing of turf to shield it from wind and sun and scouring rain. 
Gradually it becomes altogether barren. The washing of the 
soil from the mountains leaves bare ridges of sterile rock, and 
the rich organic mould which covered them, now swept down 
into the dank low grounds, promotes a luxuriance of aquatic 


216 


GEOGRAPHICAL IMPORTANCE OF THE FOREST. 


vegetation that breeds fever, and more insidious forms of mor¬ 
tal disease, by its decay, and thus the earth is rendered no 
longer fit for the habitation of man.* 

To the general truth of this sad picture there are many 
exceptions, even in countries of excessive climates. Some of 
these are due to favorable conditions of surface, of geological 
structure, and of the distribution of rain ; in many others, the 
evil consequences of man’s improvidence have not yet been 
experienced, only because a sufficient time has not elapsed, 
since the felling of the forest, to allow them to develop them¬ 
selves. But the vengeance of nature for the violation of her 
harmonies, though slow, is sure, and the gradual deterioration 
of soil and climate in such exceptional regions is as certain to 
result from the destruction of the woods as is any natural effect 
to follow its cause. 

In the vast farrago of crudities which the elder Pliny’s ambi¬ 
tion of encyclopaedic attainment and his ready credulity have 
gathered together, we meet some judicious observations. 
Among these we must reckon the remark with which he 
accompanies his extraordinary statement respecting the pre¬ 
vention of springs by the growth of forest trees, though, as is 
usual with him, his philosophy is wrong. u Destructive tor¬ 
rents are generally formed when hills are stripped of the trees 
which formerly confined and absorbed the rains.” The ab¬ 
sorption here referred to is not that of the soil, but of the roots, 
which, Pliny supposed, drank up the water to feed the growth 
of the trees. 

Although this particular evil effect of too extensive clear¬ 
ing was so early noticed, the lesson seems to have been soon 

* Almost every narrative of travel in those countries which were the 
earliest seats of civilization, contains evidence of the truth of these general 
statements, and this evidence is presented with more or less detail in most 
of the special works on the forest which I have occasion to cite. I may 
refer particularly to Hohenstein, Der Wald , 1860, as full of important 
facts on this subject. See also Caimi, Genni sulla Importanza dei Boschi , 
for some statistics not readily found elsewhere, on this and other topics 
connected with the forest. 


LITERATURE OF THE FOREST. 


217 


forgotten. The legislation of the Middle Ages in Europe is 
full of absurd provisions concerning the forests, which sover¬ 
eigns sometimes destroyed because they furnished a retreat for 
rebels and robbers, sometimes protected because they were 
necessary to breed stags and boars for the chase, and some¬ 
times spared with the more enlightened view of securing a 
supply of timber and of fuel to future generations.* It was 
reserved to later ages to appreciate their geographical import¬ 
ance, and it is only in very recent times, only in a few Eu¬ 
ropean countries, that the too general felling of the woods has 
been recognized as the most destructive among the many 
causes of the physical deterioration of the earth. 

Condition of the Forest , and its Literature in different 

Countries. 

The literature of the forest, which in England and America 
has not yet become sufficiently extensive to be known as a 
special branch of authorship, counts its thousands of volumes 
in Germany, Italy, and France. It is in the latter country, 
perhaps, that the relations of the woods to the regular drain¬ 
age of the soil, and especially to the permanence of the natural 
configuration of terrestrial surface, have been most thoroughly 
investigated. On the other hand, the purely economical as¬ 
pects of sylviculture have been most satisfactorily expounded, 

* Stanley, citing Selden, De Jure Naturally book vi, and Fabricius, 
Cod. Pseudap. V. T ., i, 874, mentions a remarkable Jewish tradition of un¬ 
certain but unquestionably ancient date, which is among the oldest evi¬ 
dences of public respect for the woods, and of enlightened views of their 
importance and proper treatment : 

“ To Joshua a fixed Jewish tradition ascribed ten decrees, laying down 
precise rules, which were instituted to protect the property of each tribe 
and of each householder from lawless depredation. Cattle, of a smaller 
kind, were to be allowed to graze in thick woods, not in thin woods; in 
woods, no kind of cattle without the owner’s consent. Sticks and branches 
might be gathered by any Hebrew, but not cut. * * * Woods might be 

pruned, provided they were not olives or fruit trees, and that there was 
sufficient shade in the place .”—Lectures on the History of the Jewish 
Church , part i, p. 271. 


218 


THE FOREST IN ITALY. 


and that art has been most philosophically discussed, and most 
sldlfully and successfully practised, in Germany. 

The eminence of Italian theoretical liydrographers and the 
great ability of Italian hydraulic engineers are well known, 
but the specific geographical importance of the woods has not 
been so clearly recognized in Italy as in the states bordering 
it on the north and west. It is true that the face of nature has 
been as completely revolutionized by man, and that the action 
of torrents has created as wide and as hopeless devastation in 
that country as in France; but in the French Empire the deso¬ 
lation produced by clearing the forests is more recent,* has 
been more suddenly effected, and, therefore, excites a livelier 
and more general interest than in Italy, where public opinion 
does not so readily connect the effect with its true cause. 
Italy, too, from ancient habit, employs little wood in architec¬ 
tural construction ; for generations she has maintained no mil¬ 
itary or commercial marine large enough to require exhaustive 
quantities of timber,f and the mildness of her climate makes 

* There seems to have been a tendency to excessive clearing in Cen¬ 
tral and Western, earlier than in Southeastern France. Wise and good 
Bernard Palissy—one of those persecuted Protestants of the sixteenth 
century, whose heroism, virtue, refinement, and taste shine out in such 
splendid contrast to the brutality, corruption, grossness, and barbarism of 
their oppressors—in the Recepte Veritable , first printed in 1563, thus com¬ 
plains : “ When I consider the value of the least clump of trees, or even of 
thorns, I much marvel at the great ignorance of men, who, as it seemeth, 
do nowadays study only to break down, fell, and waste the fair forests 
which their forefathers did guard so choicely. I would think no evil of 
them for cutting down the woods, did they but replant again some part of 
them ; but they care nought for the time to come, neither reck they of the 
great damage they do to their children which shall come after them.”— 
CEuvres Completes de Bernard Palissy , 1844, p. 88. 

t The great naval and commercial marines of Venice and of Genoa must 
have occasioned an immense consumption of lumber in the Middle Ages, 
and the centuries immediately succeeding those commonly embraced in 
that designation. The marine construction of that period employed larger 
timbers than the modern naval architecture of most commercial coun¬ 
tries, but apparently without a proportional increase of strength. The old 
modes of ship building have been, to a considerable extent, handed down 


THE FOREST IN ITALY. 


219 


small demands on the woods for fuel. Besides these circum¬ 
stances, it must be remembered that the sciences of observa¬ 
tion did not become knowledges of practical application till 
after the mischief was already mainly done and even forgotten 
in Alpine Italy, though its evils were just beginning to be 
sensibly felt in France when the claims of natural philosophy 
as a liberal study were first acknowledged in modern Europe. 
The former political condition of the Italian Peninsula would 
have effectually prevented the adoption of a general system of 
forest economy, however clearly the importance of a wise ad¬ 
ministration of this great public interest might have been 
understood. The woods which controlled and regulated the 
flow of the river sources were very often in one jurisdiction, 
the plains to be irrigated, or to be inundated by floods and 
desolated by torrents, in another. Concert of action on such a 
subject between a multitude of jealous petty sovereignties was 
obviously impossible, and nothing but the union of all the 
Italian states under a single government can render practi¬ 
cable the establishment of such arrangements for the conserva¬ 
tion and restoration of the forests and the regulation of the 
flow of the waters as are necessary for the full development of 
the yet unexhausted resources of that fairest of lands, and 
even for the permanent maintenance of the present condition 
of its physical geography. 

The denudation of the Central and Southern Apennines 
and of the Italian declivity of the Western Alps began at a 
period of unknown antiquity, but it does not seem to have 
been carried to a very dangerous length until the foreign con- 

to the present day in the Mediterranean, and an American or an English¬ 
man looks with astonishment at the huge beams and thick planks so often 
employed in the construction of very small vessels navigating that sea. 
According to Hummel, the desolation of the Karst, the high plateau lying 
north of Trieste, now one of the most parched and barren districts in 
Europe, is owing to the felling of its woods to build the navies of Venice. 
“ Where the miserable peasant of the Karst now sees nothing but bare 
rock swept and scoured by the raging Bora, the fury of this wind was 
once subdued by mighty firs, which Venice recklessly cut down to build 
her fleets .”—Physische Oeographie , p. 82. 




220 


THE FOREST IN ITALY. 


quests and extended commerce of Rome created a greatly 
increased demand for wood for the construction of ships and 
for military material. The Eastern Alps, the Western Apen¬ 
nines, and the Maritime Alps retained their forests much later; 
but even here the want of wood, and the injury to the plains 
and the navigation of the rivers by sediment brought down by 
the torrents, led to some legislation for the protection of the 
forests, by the Republic of Yenice in the fifteenth century, by 
that of Genoa as early at least as the seventeenth; and Mar- 
schand states that the latter Government passed laws requiring 
the proprietors of mountain lands to replant the woods. These, 
however, do not seem to have been effectually enforced. It is 
very common in Italy to ascribe to the French occupation 
under the first Empire all the improvements, and all the abuses 
of recent times, according to the political sympathies of the 
individual; and the French are often said to have prostrated 
every forest which has disappeared within a century.* But, 
however this may be, no energetic system of repression or 
restoration was adopted by any of the Italian states after the 
downfall of the Empire, and the taxes on forest property in 
some of them were so burdensome that rural municipalities 
sometimes proposed to cede their common woods to the Gov¬ 
ernment, without any other compensation than the remission 
of the taxes imposed on forest lands.f Under such circum¬ 
stances, woodlands would soon become disafforested, and where 
facilities of transportation and a good demand for timber have 
increased the inducements to fell it, as upon the borders of the 
Mediterranean, the destruction of the forest and all the evils 
which attend it have gone on at a seriously alarming rate. It 
has even been calculated that four tenths of the area of the 
Ligurian provinces have been washed away or rendered inca¬ 
pable of cultivation by the felling of the woods.:); 

* Le Alpi die cingono VItalia, i, p. 367. 

t See the periodical Politecnico , published at Milan, for the month of 
May, 1862, p. 234. 

t Annali di Agricoltura , Industrial e Commercio , vol. i, p. 77. 


THE FOREST IN ENGLAND. 


221 


The damp and cold climate of England requires the main¬ 
tenance of household fires through a large part of the year. 
Contrivances for economizing fuel were of later introduction 
in that country than on the Continent. The soil, like the sky, 
was, in general, charged with humidity; its natural condition 
was unfavorable for common roads, and the transportation of 
so heavy a material as coal, by land, from the remote counties 
where alone it was mined in the Middle Ages, was costly and 
difficult. For all these reasons, the consumption of wood was 
large, and apprehensions of the exhaustion of the forests were 
excited at an early period. Legislation there, as elsewhere, 
proved ineffectual to protect them, and many authors of the 
sixteenth century express fears of serious evils from the waste¬ 
ful economy of the people in this respect. Harrison, in his 
curious chapter “ Of Woods and Marishes ” in Iiolinshed’s 
compilation, complains of the rapid decrease of the forests, and 
adds : u Howbeit thus much I dare affirme, that if woods go 
so fast to decaie in the next hundred yeere of Grace, as they 
haue doone and are like to doo in this, * * * it is to 
be feared that the fennie bote, broome, turfe, gall, heath, firze, 
brakes, whinnes, ling, dies, hassacks, flags, straw, sedge, reed, 
rush, and also seacole, will be good merchandize euen in the 
citie of London, whereunto some of them euen now haue gotten 
readie passage, and taken vp their innes in the greatest mer¬ 
chants’ parlours. * * * I would wish that I might liue no 
longer than to see foure things in this land reformed, that is : 
the want of discipline in the church : the couetous dealing of 
most of our merchants in the preferment of the commodities 
of other countries, and hinderance of their owne : the holding 
of faires and markets vpon the sundaie to be abolished and 
referred to the wednesdaies: and that euerie man, in whatso- 
euer part of the champaine soile enioieth fortie acres of land, 
and vpwards, after that rate, either by free deed, copie hold, 
or fee farme, might plant one acre of wood, or sowe the same 
with oke mast, hasell, beech, and sufficient prouision be made 
that it may be cherished and kept. But I feare me that I 
should then liue too long, and so long, that I should either be 


222 


THE FOREST IN ENGLAND. 


wearie of the world, or the world of me.” * Evelyn’s “ Silva,” 
the first edition of which appeared in 1664, rendered an ex¬ 
tremely important service to the cause of the woods, and there 
is no doubt that the ornamental plantations in which England 
far surpasses all other countries, are, in some measure, the 

* Holinshed, reprint of 1807, i, pp. 357, 358. It is evident from this 
passage, and from another on page 397 of the same volume, that, though 
sea coal was largely exported to the Continent, it had not yet come into gen¬ 
eral use in England. It is a question of much interest, when coal was first 
employed in England for fuel. I can find no evidence that it was used as a 
combustible until more than a century after the Norman conquest. It has 
been said that it was known to the Anglo-Saxon population, but I am ac¬ 
quainted with no passage in the literature of that people which proves 
this. The dictionaries explain the Anglo-Saxon word gratfa by sea coal. 
I have met with this word in no Anglo-Saxon work, except in the Chron¬ 
icle , a. d. 852, from a manuscript certainly not older than the twelfth cen¬ 
tury, and in that passage it may as probably mean peat as coal, and quite 
as probably something else as either. Coal is not mentioned in King Al¬ 
fred’s Bede, in Glanville, or in Robert of Gloucester, though all these 
writers speak of jet as found in England, and are full in their enumeration 
of the mineral products of the island. 

England was anciently remarkable for its forests, but Ca>sar says it 
wanted th zfagus and the abies. There can be no doubt that fag us means 
the beech, which, as the remains in the Danish peat mosses show, is a tree 
of late introduction into Denmark, where it succeeded the fir, a tree not now 
native to that country. The succession of forest crops seems to have been 
the same in England; for Harrison, p. 359, speaks of the “ great store of 
firre ” found lying “ at their whole lengths ” in the “ fens and marises ” 
of Lancashire and other counties, where not even bushes grew in his time. 
We cannot be sure what species of evergreen Cassar intended by abies. 
The popular designations of spike-leaved trees are always more vague and 
uncertain in their application than those of broad-leaved trees. Pinus , 
pine , has been very loosely employed even in botanical nomenclature, and 
Kiefer , Fichte , and Tanne are often confounded in German. —Rossmassler, 
Der Waif pp. 256, 289, 324. If it were certain that the abies of Caesar 
was the fir formerly and still found in peat mosses, and that he was right 
in denying the existence of the beech in England in his time, the observa¬ 
tion would be very important, because it would fix a date at which the fir 
had become extinct, and the beech had not yet appeared in the island. 

The English oak, though strong and durable, was not considered gen¬ 
erally suitable for finer work in the sixteenth century. There were, how- 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON THE WATERS. 


223 


fruit of Evelyn’s enthusiasm. In England, however, arboricul¬ 
ture, the planting and nursing of single trees, has, until 
recently, been better understood than silviculture, the sowing 
and training of the forest. But this latter branch of rural 
improvement is now pursued on a very considerable scale, 
though, so far as I know, not by the National Government. 

The Influence of the Forest on Inundations. 

Besides the climatic question, which I have already suffi¬ 
ciently discussed, and the obvious inconveniences of a scanty 
supply of charcoal, of fuel, and of timber for architectural and 
naval construction, and for the thousand other uses to which 
wood is applied in rural and domestic economy, and in the 

ever, exceptions. “ Of all in Essex,” observes Harrison, Holinshed , i, p. 
357, “ that growing in Bardfield parke is the finest for ioiners craft: for 
oftentimes haue I seene of their workes made of that oke so fine and faire, 
as most of the wainescot that is brought hither out of Danske; for our 
wainescot is not made in England. Yet diuerse haue assaied to deale 
without [with our] okes to that end, but not with so good successe as 
they haue hoped, bicause the ab or iuice will not so soone be remoued 
and cleane drawne out, which some attribute to want of time in the salt 
water.” 

This passage is also of interest as showing that soaking in salt water, as 
a mode of seasoning, was practised in Harrison’s time. 

But the importation of wainscot, or boards for ceiling, panelling, and 
otherwise finishing rooms, which was generally of oak, commenced three 
centuries before the time of Harrison. On page 204 of the Liber Albus —a 
book which could have been far more valuable if the editor had given us 
the texts, with his learned notes, instead of a translation—mention is made 
of “ squared oak timber,” brought in from the country by carts, and of 
course of domestic growth, as free of city duty or octroi, and of “ planks 
of oak ” coming in in the same way as paying one plank a cartload. But 
in the chapter on the “ Customs of Billyngesgate,” pp. 208, 209, relating to 
goods imported from foreign countries, a duty of one halfpenny is imposed 
on every hundred of boards called “ weynscotte,” and of one penny 
on every hundred of boards called “ Rygholt.” The editor explains 
“ Rygholt ” as “wood of Riga.” This was doubtless pine or fir. The 
year in which these provisions were made does hot appear, but they 
belong to the reign of Henry III. 


224 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON INUNDATIONS. 


various industrial processes of civilized life, the attention of 
French foresters and public economists has been specially 
drawn to three points, namely, the influence of the forests on 
the permanence and regular flow of springs or natural foun¬ 
tains ; on inundations by the overflow of rivers; and on the 
abrasion of soil and the transportation of earth, gravel, pebbles, 
and even of considerable masses of rock, from higher to lower 
levels, by torrents. There are, however, connected with this 
general subject, several other topics of minor or strictly local 
interest, or of more uncertain character, which I shall have 
occasion more fully to speak of hereafter. 

The first of these three principal subjects—the influence 
of the woods on springs and other living waters—has been 
already considered; and if the facts stated in that discussion 
are well established, and the conclusions I have drawn from 
them are logically sound, it would seem to follow, as a neces¬ 
sary corollary, that the action of the forest is as important in 
diminishing the frequency and violence of river floods, as in 
securing the permanence and equability of natural fountains; 
for any cause which promotes the absorption and accumula^ 
tion of the water of precipitation by the superficial strata of 
the soil, to be slowly given out by infiltration and percolation, 
must, by preventing the rapid flow of surface water into the 
natural channels of drainage, tend to check the sudden rise of 
rivers, and, consequently, the overflow of their banks, which 
constitutes what is called inundation. The mechanical re¬ 
sistance, too, offered by the trunks of trees and of undergrowth 

to the flow of water over the surface, tends sensiblv to retard 

* •) 

the rapidity of its descent down declivities, and to divert and 
divide streams which may have already accumulated from 
smaller threads of water.* 

* In a letter addressed to the Minister of Public Works, after the 
terrible inundations of 1857, the Emperor thus happily expressed him¬ 
self: “Before we seek the remedy for an evil, we inquire into its cause. 
Whence come the sudden floods of our rivers ? From the water which 
falls on the mountains, not from that which falls on the plains. The 
waters which fall on our fields produce but few rivulets, but those which 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON INUNDATIONS. 


225 


Inundations are produced by the insufficiency of the nat¬ 
ural channels of rivers to carry off the waters of their basins as 
fast as those waters flow into them. In accordance with the 
usual economy of nature, we should presume that she had 
everywhere provided the means of discharging, without dis¬ 
turbance of her general arrangements or abnormal destruction 
of her products, the precipitation which she sheds upon the 
face of the earth. Observation confirms this presumption, at 
least in the countries to which I confine my inquiries ; for, so 
far as we know the primitive conditions of the regions brought 
under human occupation within the historical period, it ap¬ 
pears that the overflow of river banks was much less frequent 
and destructive than at the present day, or, at least, that rivers 
rose and fell less suddenly before man had removed the natural 
checks to the too rapid drainage of the basins in which their 
tributaries originate. The banks of the rivers and smaller 
streams in the North American colonies were formerly little 
abraded by the currents. Even now the trees come down 
almost to the water’s edge along the rivers, in the larger for¬ 
ests of the United States, and the surface of the streams seems 
liable to no great change in level or in rapidity of current. A 
circumstance almost conclusive as to the regularity of flow in 
forest rivers, is that they do not form large sedimentary de¬ 
posits, at their points of discharge into lakes or larger streams, 
such accumulations beginning, or at least advancing far more 
rapidly, after the valleys are cleared. 

In the Northern United States, although inundations are 
sometimes produced in the height of summer by heavy rains, 
it will be found generally true that the most rapid rise of the 


fall on onr roofs and are collected in the gutters, form small streams at 
once. Now, the roofs are mountains—the gutters are valleys.” 

“To continue the comparison,” observes D’Hericourt, “roofs are 
smooth and impermeable, and the rain water pours rapidly off from their 
surfaces; but this rapidity of flow would be greatly diminished if the roofs 
were carpeted with mosses and grasses 5 more still, if they were covered 
with dry leaves, little shrubs, strewn branches, and other impediments—in 
short, if they were wooded.”— A.nnciles Fovestidres, Dec ., 18o7, p. 311. 

15 


226 


FLOODS IN THE UNITED STATES. 


waters, and, of course, the most destructive “ freshets,” as they 
are called in America, are produced by the sudden dissolution 
of the snow before the open ground is thawed in the spring. 
It frequently happens that a powerful thaw sets in after a long 
period of frost, and the snow which had been months in accu¬ 
mulating is dissolved and carried off in a few hours. When 
the snow is deep, it, to use a popular expression, “ takes the 
frost out of the ground ” in the woods, and, if it lies long 
enough, in the fields also. But the heaviest snows usually fall 
after midwinter, and are succeeded by warm rains or sunshine, 
which dissolve the snow on the cleared land before it has had 
time to act upon the frost-bound soil beneath it. In this case, 
the snow in the woods is absorbed as fast as it melts, by the 
soil it has protected from freezing, and does not materially con¬ 
tribute to swell the current of the rivers. If the mild weather, 
in which great snowstorms usually occur, does not continue 
and become a regular thaw, it is almost sure to be followed by 
drifting winds, and the inequality with which they distribute 
the snow leaves the ridges comparatively bare, while the de¬ 
pressions are often filled with drifts to the height of many feet. 
The knolls become frozen to a great depth ; succeeding partial 
thaws melt the surface snow, and the water runs down into the 
furrows of ploughed fields, and other artificial and natural hol¬ 
lows, and then often freezes to solid ice. In this state of things, 
almost the entire surface of the cleared land is impervious to 
water, and from the absence of trees and the general smooth¬ 
ness of the ground, it offers little mechanical resistance to 
superficial currents. If, under these circumstances, warm 
weather accompanied by rain occurs, the rain and melted 
snow are swiftly hurried to the bottom of the valleys and 
gathered to raging torrents. 

It ought further to be considered that, though the lighter 
ploughed soils readily imbibe a great deal of water, yet the 
grass lands, and all the heavy and tenacious earths, absorb it 
in much smaller quantities, and less rapidly than the vegetable 
mould of the forest. Pasture, meadow, and clayey soils, taken 
together, greatly predominate over the sandy ploughed fields, 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON INUNDATIONS. 227 

in all large agricultural districts, and lienee, even if, in tlie 
case we are supposing, the open ground chance to have been 
thawed before the melting of the snow which covers it, it is 
already saturated with moisture, or very soon becomes so, and, 
of course, cannot relieve the pressure by absorbing more water. 
The consequence is that the face of the country is suddenly 
flooded with a quantity of melted snow and rain equivalent to 
a fall of six or eight inches of the latter, or even more. This 
runs unobstructed to rivers often still bound with thick ice, 
and thus inundations of a fearfully devastating character are 
produced. The ice bursts, from the hydrostatic pressure from 
below, or is violently torn up by the current, and swept by 
the impetuous stream, in large masses and with resistless fury, 
against banks, bridges, dams, and mills erected near them. 
The bark of the trees along the rivers is often abraded, at a 
height of many feet above the ordinary water level, by cakes 
of floating ice, which are at last stranded by the receding flood 
on meadow or ploughland, to delay, by their chilling influence, 
the advance of the tardy spring. 

The surface of a forest, in its natural condition, can never 
pour forth such deluges of water as flow from cultivated soil. 
Humus, or vegetable mould, is capable of absorbing almost 
twice its own weight of water. The soil in a forest of decid¬ 
uous foliage is composed of humus, more or less unmixed, to 
the depth of several inches, sometimes even of feet, and this 
stratum is usually able to imbibe all the water possibly result¬ 
ing from the snow which at any one time covers it. But the 
vegetable mould does not cease to absorb water when it be- 
comes saturated, for it then gives off a portion of its moisture 
to the mineral earth below, and thus is ready to receive a new 
supply ; and, besides, the bed of leaves not yet converted to 
mould takes up and retains a very considerable proportion of 
snow water, as well as of rain. 

In the warm climates of Southern Europe, as I have 
already said, the functions of the forest, so far as the disposal 
of the water of precipitation is concerned, are essentially the 
same at all seasons, and are analogous to those which it per- 


228 


OBSERVATIONS OF BELGRAND. 


forms in the Northern United States in summer. Ilence, in 
the former countries, the winter floods have not the character¬ 
istics which mark them in the latter, nor is the conservative 
influence of the woods in winter relatively so important, 
though it is equally unquestionable. 

If the summer floods in the United States are attended 
with less pecuniary damage than those of the Loire and other 
rivers of France, the Po and its tributaries in Italy, the Emme 
and her sister torrents which devastate the valleys of Switzer¬ 
land, it is partly because the banks of American rivers are not 
yet lined with towns, their shores and the bottoms which skirt 
them not yet covered with improvements whose cost is counted 
by millions, and, consequently, a smaller amount of property 
is exposed to injury by inundation. But the comparative 
exemption of the American people from the terrible calamities 
which the overflow of rivers has brought on some of the fairest 
portions of the Old World, is, in a still greater degree, to be 
ascribed to the fact that, with all our thoughtless improvidence, 
we have not yet bared all the sources of our streams, not yet 
overthrown all the barriers which nature has erected to restrain 
her own destructive energies. Let us be wise in time, and 
profit by the errors of our older brethren ! 

The influence of the forest in preventing inundations has 
been very generally recognized, both as a theoretical inference 
and as a fact of observation; but Belgrand and his commen¬ 
tator Valles have deduced an opposite result from various facts 
of experience and from scientific considerations. They con¬ 
tend that the superficial drainage is more regular from cleared 
than from wooded ground, and that clearing diminishes rather 
than augments the intensity of inundations. Neither of these 
conclusions is warranted by their data or their reasoning, and 
they rest partly upon facts, which, truly interpreted, are not 
inconsistent with the received opinions on these subjects, 
partly upon assumptions which are contradicted by experience. 
Two of these latter are, first, that the fallen leaves in the for¬ 
est constitute an impermeable covering of the soil over, not 
through, which the water of rains and of melting snows flows 


OBSERVATIONS OF BELGRAND. 


229 


off, and secondly, that the roots of trees penetrate and choke 
up the fissures in the rocks, so as to impede the passage of 
water through channels which nature has provided for its 
descent to lower strata. 

As to the first of these, we may appeal to familiar facts 
within the personal knowledge of every man acquainted with 
the operations of sylvan nature. I have before me a letter 
from an acute and experienced observer, containing this para¬ 
graph : “ I think that rain water does not ever, except in very 
trifling quantities, flow over the leaves in the woods in sum¬ 
mer or autumn. Water runs over them only in the spring, 
when they are pressed down smoothly and compactly, a state 
in which they remain only until they are dry, when shrink¬ 
age and the action of the wind soon roughen the surface so as 
effectually to stop, by absorption, all flow of water.” I have 
observed that when a sudden frost succeeds a thaw at the close 
of the winter after the snow has principally disappeared, the 
water in and between the layers of leaves sometimes freezes 
into a solid crust, which allows the flow of water over it. But 
this occurs only in depressions and on a very small scale ; and 
the ice thus formed is so soon dissolved that no sensible effect 
is produced on the escape of water from the general surface. 

As to the influence of roots upon drainage, I believe there 
is no doubt that they, independently of their action as absorb¬ 
ents, mechanically promote it. Not only does the water of 
the soil follow them downward,* but their swelling growth 
powerfully tends to enlarge the crevices of rock into which 
they enter; and as the fissures in rocks are longitudinal, not 
mere circular orifices, every line of additional width gained by 
the growth of roots within them increases the area of the crev- 

* “ The roots of vegetables,” says D’H6ricourt, “ perform the office of 
a perpendicular drainage analogous to that which has been practised with 
success in Holland and in some parts of the British Islands. This system 
consists in driving down three or four thousand stakes upon a hectare ; 
the rain water filters down along the stakes, and, in certain cases, as 
favorable results are obtained by this method as by horizontal drains.”— 
Annales Forestidres , 1857, p. 812. 


230 


EFFECTS OF INUNDATIONS. 


ice in proportion to its length. Consequently, the widening 
of a fissure to the extent of one inch might give an additional 
drainage equal to a square foot of open tubing. 

The observations and reasonings of Belgrand and Valles, 
though their conclusions have not been accepted by many, are 
very important in one point of view. These w'riters insist 
much on the necessity of taking into account, in estimating 
the relations between precipitation and evaporation, the ab¬ 
straction of water from the surface and surface currents, by 
absorption and infiltration—an element unquestionably of 
great value, but hitherto much neglected by meteorological 
inquirers, who have very often reasoned as if the surface earth 
were either impermeable to water, or already saturated with 
it; whereas, in fact, it is a sponge, always imbibing humidity 
and always giving it off, not by evaporation only, but by infil¬ 
tration and percolation. 

The destructive effects of inundations considered simply as 
a mechanical power by which life is endangered, crops de¬ 
stroyed, and the artificial constructions of man overthrown, 
are very terrible. Thus far, however, the flood is a temporary 
and by no means an irreparable evil, for if its ravages end here, 
the prolific powers of nature and the industry of man soon 
restore what had been lost, and the face of the earth no longer 
shows traces of the deluge that had overwhelmed it. Inunda¬ 
tions have even their compensations. The structures they 
destroy are replaced by better and more secure erections, and 
if they sweep off a crop of corn, they not unfrequently leave 
behind them, as they subside, a fertilizing deposit which en¬ 
riches the exhausted field for a succession of seasons.* If, 

* The productiveness of Egypt has been attributed too exclusively to the 
fertilizing effects of the slime deposited by the inundations of the Nile; 
for in that climate a liberal supply of water would produce good crops on 
almost any ordinary sand, while, without water, the richest soil would 
yield nothing. The sediment deposited annually is but a very small frac¬ 
tion of an inch in thickness. It is alleged that in quantity it would be 
hardly sufficient for a good top dressing, and that in quality it is not chem¬ 
ically distinguishable from the soil inches or feet below the surface. But 


DESTRUCTIVE ACTION OF TORRENTS. 


231 


then, the too rapid flow of the surface waters occasioned no 
other evil than to produce, once in ten years upon the average, 
an inundation which should destroy the harvest of the low 
grounds along the rivers, the damage would be too inconsid¬ 
erable, and of too transitory a character, to warrant the incon¬ 
veniences and the expense involved in the measures which the 
most competent judges in many parts of Europe believe the 
respective governments ought to take to obviate it. 


Destructive Action of Torrents. 

But the great, the irreparable, the appalling mischiefs 
which have already resulted, and threaten to ensue on a still 
more extensive scale hereafter, from too rapid superficial drain¬ 
age, are of a properly geographical character, and consist 
primarily in erosion, displacement, and transportation of the 
superficial strata, vegetable and mineral—of the integuments, 
so to speak, with which nature has clothed the skeleton frame¬ 
work of the globe. It is difficult to convey by description an 
idea of the desolation of the regions most exposed to the rav¬ 
ages of torrent and of flood ; and the thousands, who, in these 
days of travel, are whirled by steam near or even through the 
theatres of these calamities, have but rare and imperfect oppor¬ 
tunities of observing the destructive causes in action. Still 
more rarely can they compare the past with the actual condi¬ 
tion of the provinces in cpiestion, and trace the progress of 
their conversion from forest-crowned hills, luxuriant pasture 


to deny, as some writers have done, that the slime has any fertilizing prop¬ 
erties at all, is as great an error as the opposite one of ascribing all the 
agricultural wealth of Egypt to that single cause of productiveness. Fine 
soils deposited by water are almost uniformly rich in all climates; those 
brought down by rivers, carried out into salt water, and then returned 
again by the tide, seem to be more permanently fertile than any others. 
The polders of the Netherland coast are of this character, and the meadows 
in Lincolnshire, which have been covered with slime by warping , as it is 
called, or admitting water over them at high tide, are remarkably pro¬ 
ductive. 


232 


DANGER OF TORRENTS IN THE UNITED STATES. 


grounds, and abundant cornfields and vineyards well watered 
by springs and fertilizing rivulets, to bald mountain ridges, 
rocky declivities, and steep earth banks furrowed by deep 
ravines with beds now dry, now filled by torrents of fluid 
mud and gravel hurrying down to spread themselves over the 
plain, and dooming to everlasting barrenness the once produc¬ 
tive fields. In traversing such scenes, it is difficult to resist 
the impression that nature pronounced the curse of perpetual 
sterility and desolation upon these sublime but fearful wastes, 
difficult to believe that they were once, and but for the folly 
of man might still be, blessed with all the natural advantages 
which Providence has bestowed upon the most favored climes. 
But the historical evidence is conclusive as to the destructive 
changes occasioned by the agency of man upon the flanks of 
the Alps, the Apennines, the Pyrenees, and other mountain 
ranges in Central and Southern Europe, and the progress of 
physical deterioration has been so rapid that, in some local¬ 
ities, a single generation has witnessed the beginning and the 
end of the melancholy revolution. 

It is certain that a desolation, like that which has over¬ 
whelmed many once beautiful and fertile regions of Europe, 
awaits an important part of the territory of the United States, 
and of other comparatively new countries over which European 
civilization is now extending its sway, unless prompt measures 
are taken to check the action of destructive causes already in 
operation. It is vain to expect that legislation can do any¬ 
thing effectual to arrest the progress of the evil in those coun¬ 
tries, except so far as the state is still the proprietor of exten¬ 
sive forests. Woodlands which have passed into private hands 
will everywhere be managed, in spite of legal restrictions, upon 
the same economical principles as other possessions, and every 
proprietor will, as a general rule, fell his woods, unless he 
believes that it will be for his pecuniary interest to preserve 
them. Few of the new provinces which the last three cen¬ 
turies have brought under the control of the European race, 
would tolerate any interference by the law-making power with 
what they regard as the most sacred of civil rights—the right, 


LEGISLATION ON THE FOREST. 


233 


namely, of every man to do what he will with his own. In the 
Old World, even in France, whose people, of all European 
nations, love best to be governed and are least annoyed by 
bureaucratic supervision, law has been found impotent to pre¬ 
vent the destruction, or wasteful economy, of private forests; 
and in many of the mountainous departments of that country, 
man is at this moment so fast laying waste the face of the 
earth, that the most serious fears are entertained, not only of 
the depopulation of those districts, but of enormous mischiefs 
to the provinces contiguous to them.* The only legal pro¬ 
visions from which anything is to be hoped, are such as shall 
make it a matter of private advantage to the landholder to 
spare the trees upon his grounds, and promote the growth of 
the young wood. Something may be done by exempting 
standing forests from taxation, and by imposing taxes on wood 
felled for fuel or for timber, something by premiums or hon¬ 
orary distinctions for judicious management of the woods. It 

* u The laws against clearing have never been able to prevent these oper¬ 
ations when the proprietor found his advantage in them, and the long 
series of royal ordinances and decrees of parliaments, proclaimed from 
the days of Charlemagne to our own, with a view of securing forest prop¬ 
erty, have served only to show the impotence of legislative action on this 
subject.”— Clave, Etudes sur VEconomie Forestiere, p. 32. 

“ A proprietor can always contrive to clear his woods, whatever may 
be done to prevent him; it is a mere question of time, and a few impru¬ 
dent cuttings, a few abuses of the right of pasturage, suffice to destroy a 
forest in spite of all regulations to the contrary.”— Dunoyeb, De la Liberte 
du Travail, ii, p. 452, as quoted by Clav6, p. 353. 

Both authors agree that the preservation of the forests in France is 
practicable only by their transfer to the state, which alone can protect 
them and secure their proper treatment. It is much to be feared that 
even this measure would be inadequate to save the forests of the American 
UnioD. There is little respect for public property in America, and the 
Federal Government, certainly, would not be the proper agent of the 
nation for this purpose. It proved itself unable to protect the live-oak 
woods of Florida, which were intended to be preserved for the use of the 
navy, and it more than once paid contractors a high price for timber stolen 
from its own forests. The authorities of the individual States might be 
more efficient. 


234 


PUBLIC FORESTS-AMERICAN FORESTS. 


would be difficult to induce governments, general or local, to 
make the necessary appropriations for such purposes, but there 
can be no doubt that it would be sound economy in the end. 

In countries where there exist municipalities endowed with 
an intelligent public spirit, the purchase and control of forests 
by such corporations would often prove advantageous ; and in 
some of the provinces of Northern Lombardy, experience has 
shown that such operations may be conducted with great ben¬ 
efit to all the interests connected with the proper management 
of the woods. In Switzerland, on the other hand, except in 
some few cases where woods have been preserved as a defence 
against avalanches, the forests of the communes have been 
productive of little advantage to the public interests, and have 
very generally gone to decay. The rights of pasturage, every¬ 
where destructive to trees, combined with toleration of tres¬ 
passes, have so reduced their value, that there is, too often, 
nothing left that is worth protecting. In the canton of Ticino, 
the peasants have very frequently voted to sell the town woods 
and divide the proceeds among the corporators. The some¬ 
times considerable sums thus received are squandered in wild 
revelry, and the sacrifice of the forests brings not even a mo¬ 
mentary benefit to the proprietors.* 

It is evidently a matter of the utmost importance that the 
public, and especially land owners, be roused to a sense of the 
dangers to which the indiscriminate clearing of the woods may 
expose not only future generations, but the very soil itself. 
Fortunately, some of the American States, as well as the gov¬ 
ernments of many European colonies, still retain the ownership 
of great tracts of primitive woodland. The State of New 
York, for example, has, in its northeastern counties, a vast 
extent of territory in which the lumberman has only here and 
there established his camp, and where the forest, though inter¬ 
spersed with permanent settlements, robbed of some of its 
finest pine groves, and often ravaged by devastating fires, still 

* See the lively account of the sale of a communal wood in Beelepsoh, 
Die Alpen , Holzschlager und Flosser. 


THE ADIRONDACK FOREST. 


235 


covers far the largest proportion of the surface. Through this 
territory, the soil is generally poor, and even the new clearings 
have little of the luxuriance of harvest which distinguishes 
them elsewhere. The value of the land for agricultural uses 
is therefore very small, and few purchases are made for any 
other purpose than to strip the soil of its timber. It has been 
often proposed that the State should declare the remaining 
forest the inalienable property of the commonwealth, but I 
believe the motive of the suggestion has originated rather in 
poetical than in economical views of the subject. Both these 
classes of considerations have a real worth. It is desirable that 
some large and easily accessible region of American soil should 
remain, as far as possible, in its primitive condition, at once a 
museum for the instruction of the student, a garden for the 
recreation of the lover of nature, and an asylum where indi¬ 
genous tree, and humble plant that loves the shade, and fish 
and fowl and four-footed beast, may dwell and perpetuate their 
kind, in the enjoyment of such imperfect protection as the 
laws of a people jealous of restraint can afford them. The 
immediate loss to the public treasury from the adoption of this 
policy would be inconsiderable, for these lands are sold at low 
rates. The forest alone, economically managed, would, with¬ 
out injury, and even with benefit to its permanence and growth, 
soon yield a regular income larger than the present value of 
the fee. 

The collateral advantages of the preservation of these for¬ 
ests would be far greater. Nature threw up those mountains 
and clothed them with lofty woods, that they might serve as a 
reservoir to supply with perennial waters the thousand rivers 
and rills that are fed by the rains and snows of the Adiron- 
dacks, and as a screen for the fertile plains of the central coun¬ 
ties against the chilling blasts of the north wind, which meet 
no other barrier in their sweep from the Arctic pole. The 
climate of Northern New York even now presents greater 
extremes of temperature than that of Southern France. The 
long continued cold of winter is far more intense, the short 
heats of summer not less fierce than in Provence, and hence 


236 


DESTRUCTIVE ACTION OF TORRENTS. 


the preservation of every influence that tends to maintain an 
equilibrium of temperature and humidity is of cardinal im¬ 
portance. The felling of the Adirondack woods would ulti¬ 
mately involve for Northern and Central New York conse¬ 
quences similar to those which have resulted from the lay¬ 
ing bare of the southern and western declivities of the French 
Alps and the spurs, ridges, and detached peaks in front of 
them. 

It is true that the evils to be apprehended from the clearing 
of the mountains of New York may be less in degree than 
those which a similar cause has produced in Southern France, 
where the intensity of its action has been increased by the 
inclination of the mountain declivities, and by the peculiar 
geological constitution of the earth. The degradation of the 
soil is, perhaps, not equally promoted by a combination of the 
same circumstances, in any of the American Atlantic States, 
but still they have rapid slopes and loose and friable soils 
enough to render widespread desolation certain, if the further 
destruction of the woods is not soon arrested. The effects of 
clearing are already perceptible in the comparatively unvio¬ 
lated region of which I am speaking. The rivers which rise 
m it, flow with diminished currents in dry seasons, and with 
augmented volumes of water after heavy rains. They bring 
down much larger quantities of sediment, and the increasing 
obstructions to the navigation of the Hudson, which are ex¬ 
tending themselves down the channel in proportion as the 
fields are encroaching upon the forest, give good grounds for 
the fear of serious injury to the commerce of the important 
towns on the upper waters of that river, unless measures are 
taken to prevent the expansion of u improvements ” which 
have already been carried beyond the demands of a wise 
economy. 

I have stated, in a general way, the nature of the evils in 
question, and of the processes by which they are produced; 
but I shall make their precise character and magnitude better 
understood by presenting some descriptive and statistical de¬ 
tails of facts of actual occurrence. I select for this purpose the 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


237 


southeastern portion of France, not because that territory lias 
suffered more severely than some others, but because its de¬ 
terioration is comparatively recent, and lias been watched and 
described by very competent and trustworthy observers, wdiose 
reports are more easily accessible than those published in other 
countries.* 

The provinces of Dauphiny, Avignon, and Provence com¬ 
prise a territory of fourteen or fifteen thousand square miles, 
bounded northwest by the Isere, northeast and east by the 
Alps, south by the Mediterranean, west by the Rhone, and 
extending from 42° to about 45° of north latitude. The sur¬ 
face is generally hilly and even mountainous, and several of 
the peaks in Dauphiny rise above the limit of perpetual snow. 
The climate, as compared with that of the United States in the 
same latitude, is extremely mild. Little snow falls, except 
upon the higher mountain ranges, the frosts are light, and the 
summers long, as might, indeed, be inferred from the vegeta¬ 
tion ; for in the cultivated districts, the vine and the fig every¬ 
where flourish, the olive thrives as far north as 43^°, and upon 
the coast, grow the orange, the lemon, and the date palm. The 
forest trees, too, are of southern type, umbrella pines, various 
species of evergreen oaks, and many other trees and shrubs of 
persistent broad-leaved foliage, characterizing the landscape. 

The rapid slope of the mountains naturally exposed these 
provinces to damage by torrents, and the Romans diminished 
their injurious effects by erecting, in the beds of ravines, bar¬ 
riers of rocks loosely piled up, which permitted a slow escape 
of the water, but compelled it to deposit above the dikes the 

* Strefflenr (JTeber die Natur und die Wirlcungen der Wildbdche , p. 8) 
maintains that all the observations and speculations of French authors 
on the nature of torrents had been anticipated by Austrian writers. In 
proof of this assertion he refers to the works of Franz von Zallinger, 1778, 
Yon Arretin, 1808, Franz Duile, 1826, all published at Innsbruck, and 
Hagen’s Beschreibung neuerer Wasserbauwerfce, Konigsberg, 1826, none of 
which works are known to me. It is evident, however, that the conclu¬ 
sions of Surell and other French writers whom I cite, are original results 
of personal investigation, and not borrowed opinions. 


238 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


earth, and gravel with which it was charged. - * At a latei* 
period the Crusaders brought home from Palestine, with much 
other knowledge gathered from the wiser Moslems, the art of 
securing the hillsides, and making them productive by ter¬ 
racing and irrigation. The forests which covered the moun¬ 
tains secured an abundant flow of springs, and the process of 
clearing the soil went on so slowly that, for centuries, neither 
the want of timber and fuel, nor the other evils about to be 
depicted, were seriously felt. Indeed, throughout the Middle 
Ages, these provinces were well wooded, and famous for the 
fertility and abundance, not only of the low grounds, but of 
the hills. 

Such was the state of things at the close of the fifteenth 
century. The statistics of the seventeenth show that while 
there had been an increase of prosperity and population in 
Lower Provence, as well as in the correspondingly situated 
parts of the other two provinces I have mentioned, there was 
an alarming decrease both in the wealth and in the population 
of Upper Provence and Dauphiny, although, by the clearing 
of the forests, a great extent of plough land and pasturage had 
been added to the soil before reduced to cultivation. It was 
found, in fact, that the augmented violence of the torrents had 
swept away, or buried in sand and gravel, more land than had 
been reclaimed by clearing ; and the taxes computed by fires 
or habitations underwent several successive reductions in con- 

* "Whether Palissy was acquainted with this ancient practice, or 
whether it was one of those original suggestions of which his works are 
so full, I know not; hut in his treatise, Des Faux et Fontaines , he thus 
recommends it, by way of reply to the objections of “Theorique,” who 
had expressed the fear that “the waters which rush violently down from 
the heights of the mountain would bring with them much earth, sand, and 
other things,” and thus spoil the artificial fountain that “ Practique ” was 
teaching him to make: “ And for hindrance of the mischiefs of great 
waters which may be gathered in few hours by great storms, when thou 
shalt have made ready thy parterre to receive the water, thou must lay 
great stones athwart the deep channels which lead to thy parterre. And 
so the force of the rushing currents shall be deadened, and thy water shall 
flow peacefully into his cisterns .”—(Euvres Completes , p. 173. 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


239 


sequence of the gradual abandonment of the wasted soil by its 
starving occupants. The growth of the large towns on and 
near the Rhone and the coast, their advance in commerce and 
industry, and the consequently enlarged demand for agricul¬ 
tural products, ought naturally to have increased the rural 
population and the value of their lands; but the physical 
decay of the uplands was such that considerable tracts were 
deserted altogether, and in Upper Provence, the fires which in 
1471 counted 897, were reduced to 747 in 1699, to 728 in 
1733, and to 635 in 1776. 

These facts I take from the La Provence au point de vue 
des Bois , des Torrents et des Inondations , of Charles de Ribbe, 
one of the highest authorities, and I add further details from 
the same source. 

“ Commune of Barles, 1707: Two hills have become con¬ 
nected by land slides, and have formed a lake which covers 
the best part of the soil. 1746 : New slides buried twenty 
houses composing a village, no trace of which is left; more 
than one third of the land had disappeared. 

“ Monans, 1724: Deserted by its inhabitants and no longer 
cultivated. 

“ Gueydan, 1760 : It appears by records that the best 
grounds have been swept off since 1756, and that ravines 
occupy their place. 

“ Digne, 1762 : The river Bleone has destroyed the most 
valuable part of the territory. 

“ Malmaison, 1768 : The inhabitants have emigrated, all 
their fields having been lost.” 

In the case of the commune of St. Laurent du Yar, it 
appears that, after clearings in the Alps, succeeded by others 
in the common woods of the town, the floods of the torrent 
Yar became more formidable, and had already carried off 
much land as early as 1708. “ The clearing continued, and 

more soil was swept away in 1761. In 1762, after another 
destructive inundation, many of the inhabitants emigrated, 
and in 1765, one half of the territory had been laid waste. 

“ In 1766, the assessor Serraire said to the Assembly: ‘As 


240 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


to tlie damage caused by brooks and torrents, it is impossible 
to deny its extent Upper Provence is in danger of total de¬ 
struction, and the waters which lay it waste threaten also the 
ruin of the most valuable grounds on the plain below. Vil¬ 
lages have been almost submerged by torrents which formerly 
had not even names, and large towns are on the point of 
destruction from the same cause.’ ” 

In 1776, Viscount Puget thus reported : “ The mere aspect 
of Upper Provence is calculated to appal the patriotic magis¬ 
trate. One sees only lofty mountains, deep valleys with pre¬ 
cipitous sides, rivers with broad beds and little water, impet¬ 
uous torrents, which in floods lay waste the cultivated land 
upon their banks and roll huge rocks along their channels; 
steep and parched hillsides, the melancholy consequences of 
indiscriminate clearing ; villages whose inhabitants, finding no 
longer the means of subsistence, are emigrating day by day; 
houses dilapidated to huts, and but a miserable remnant of 
population.” 

u In a document of the year 1771, the ravages of the tor¬ 
rents were compared to the effects of an earthquake, half the 
soil in many communes seeming to have been swallowed up. 

“ Our mountains,” said the administrators of the province 
of the Lower Alps in 1792, “ present nothing but a surface of 
stony tufa ; clearing is still going on, and the little rivulets are 
becoming torrents. Many communes have lost their harvests, 
their flocks, and their houses by floods. The washing down 
of the mountains is to be ascribed to the clearings and the 
practice of burning them over.” 

These complaints, it will be seen, all date before the Revo¬ 
lution, but the desolation they describe has since advanced 
with still swifter steps. 

Surell—whose valuable work, Etude sur les Torrents 
des Ilautes Alpes , published in 1841, presents the most appall¬ 
ing picture of the desolations of the torrent, and, at the same 
time, the most careful studies of the history and essential char¬ 
acter of this great evil—in speaking of the valley of Devoluy, 
on page 152, says : “ Everything concurs to show that it was 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


241 


anciently wooded. In its peat bogs are fonnd buried trunks 
of trees, monuments of its former vegetation. In the frame¬ 
work of old houses, one sees enormous timber, which is no 
longer to be found in the district. Many localities, now com¬ 
pletely bare, still retain the name of ‘ wood,’ and one of them 
is called, in old deeds, Coniba nigra [Black forest or dell], on 
account of its dense woods. These and many other proofs 
confirm the local traditions which are unanimous on this 
point. 

“ There, as everywhere in the Upper Alps, the clearings 
began on the flanks of the mountains, and were gradually 
extended into the valleys and then to the highest accessible 
peaks. Then followed the Revolution, and caused the destruc¬ 
tion of the remainder of the trees which had thus far escaped 
the woodman’s axe.” 

In a note to this passage, the writer says: “ Several per¬ 
sons have told me that they had lost flocks of sheep, by stray¬ 
ing, in the forests of Mont Auroux, which covered the flanks 
of the mountain from La Cluse to Agneres. These declivities 
are now as bare as the palm of the hand.” 

The ground upon the steep mountains being once bared of 
trees, and the underwood killed by the grazing of horned cat¬ 
tle, sheep, and goats, every depression becomes a watercourse. 
“ Every storm,” says Surell, page 153, “ gives rise to a new 
torrent. Examples of such are shown, which, though not yet 
three years old, have laid waste the finest fields of their val¬ 
leys, and whole villages have narrowly escaped being swept 
into ravines formed in the course of a few hours. Sometimes 
the flood pours in a sheet over the surface, without ravine or 
even bed, and ruins extensive grounds, which are abandoned 
forever.” 

I cannot follow Surell in his description and classification 
of torrents, and I must refer the reader to his instructive work 
for a full exposition of the theory of the subject. In order, 
however, to show what a concentration of destructive energies 
may be effected by felling the woods that clothe and support 
the sides of mountain abysses, I cite his description of a valley 

16 


242 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


descending from the Col Isoard, which he calls u a complete 
type of a basin of reception,” that is, a gorge which serves as 
a common point of accumulation and discharge for the waters 
of several lateral torrents. u The aspect ot the monstrous 
channel,” says he, “is frightful. Within a distance of less 
than three kilometres [= one mile and seven eighths English], 
more than sixty torrents hurl into the depths of the gorge the 
debris torn from its two flanks. The smallest of these sec¬ 
ondary torrents, if transferred to a fertile valley, would be 
enough to ruin it.” 

The eminent political economist Blanqui, in a memoir read 
before the Academy of Moral and Political Science on the 25th 
of November, 1843, thus expresses himself: “ Important as 
are the causes of impoverishment already described, they are 
not to be compared to the consequences which have followed 
from the two inveterate evils of the Alpine provinces of 
France, the extension of clearing and the ravages of torrents. 
* * The most important result of this destruction is this: 

that the agricultural capital, or rather the ground itself— 
which, in a rapidly increasing degree, is daily swept away by 
the waters—is totally lost. Signs of unparalleled destitution 
are visible in all the mountain zone, and the solitudes of those 
districts are assuming an indescribable character of sterility 
and desolation. The gradual destruction of the woods has, in 
a thousand localities, annihilated at once the springs and the 
fuel. Between Grenoble and Briangon in the valley of the 
Bomanche, many villages are so destitute of wood that they 
are reduced to the necessity of baking their bread with sun- 
dried cowdung, and even this they can afford to do but once 
a year. This bread becomes so hard that it can be cut only 
with an axe, and I have myself seen a loaf of bread in Septem¬ 
ber, at the kneading of which I was present the January 
previous. 

“ Whoever has visited the valley of Barcelonette, those of 
Embrun, and of Yerdun, and that Arabia Petroea of the de¬ 
partment of the Upper Alps, called Devoluy, knows that there 
is no time to lose, that in fifty years from this date France 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


243 


will be separated from Savoy, as Egypt from Syria, by a 
desert.” * 

It deserves to be specially noticed that the district here 
referred to, though now among the most hopelessly waste in 
France, was very productive even down to so late a period as 
the commencement of the French Revolution. Arthur Young, 
writing in 1789, says : “ About Barcelonette and in the high¬ 
est parts of the mountains, the hill pastures feed a million of 
sheep, besides large herds of other cattle; ” and he adds: 
u With such a soil, and in such a climate we are not to sup¬ 
pose a country barren because it is mountainous. The valleys 
I have visited are, in general, beautiful.” f He ascribes the 
same character to the provinces of Dauphiny, Provence, and 
Auvergne, and, though he visited, with the eye of an attentive 
and practised observer, many of the scenes since blasted with 
the wild desolation described by Blanqui, the Durance and a 
part of the course of the Loire are the only streams he men¬ 
tions as inflicting serious injury by their floods. The ravages 
of the torrents had, indeed, as we have seen, commenced earlier 
in some other localities, but we are authorized to infer that 
they were, in Young’s time, too limited in range, and rela¬ 
tively too insignificant, to require notice in a general view of 
the provinces where they have now ruined so large a propor¬ 
tion of the soil. 

But I resume my citations. 

“ I do not exaggerate,” says Blanqui. “ When I shall have 
finished my excursion and designated localities by their names, 

* Ladoucette says the peasant of Devoluy “ often goes a distance of 
five hours over rocks and precipices for a single [man’s] load of wood ; ” 
and he remarks on another page, that “ the justice of peace of that canton 
had, in the course of forty-three years, but once heard the voice of the 
nightingale.”— Histoire , etc., des Hautes Alpes , pp. 220, 434. 

t The valley of Embrun, now almost completely devastated, was once 
remarkable for its fertility. In 1806, Hericart de Thury said of it: “In 
this magnificent valley nature had been prodigal of her gifts. Its inhabit¬ 
ants have blindly revelled in her favors, and fallen asleep in the midst of 
her profusion.”— Becquerel, Des Glvmats , etc., p. 314. 


244 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


there will rise, I am sure, more than one voice from the spots 
themselves, to attest the rigorous exactness of this picture of 
their wretchedness. I have never seen its equal even in the 
Kabyle villages of the province of Constantine ; for there you 
can travel on horseback, and you find grass in the spring, 
whereas in more than fifty communes in the Alps there is 
absolutely nothing. 

“ The clear, brilliant, Alpine sky of Embrun, of Gap, of 
Barcelonette, and of Digne, which for months is without a 
cloud, produces droughts interrupted only by diluvial rains 
like those of the tropics. The abuse of the right of pasturage 
and the felling of the woods have stripped the soil of all its 
grass and all its trees, and the scorching sun bakes it to the 
consistence of porphyry. When moistened by the rain, as it 
has neither support nor cohesion, it rolls down to the valleys, 
sometimes in floods resembling black, yellow, or reddish lava, 
sometimes in streams of pebbles, and even huge blocks of 
stone, which pour down with a frightful roar, and in their 
swift course exhibit the most convulsive movements. If you 
overlook from an eminence one of these landscapes furrowed 
with so many ravines, it presents only images of desolation 
and of death. Yast deposits of flinty pebbles, many feet in 
thickness, which have rolled down and spread far over the 
plain, surround large trees, bury even their tops, and rise 
above them, leaving to the husbandman no longer a ray of 
hope. One can imagine no sadder spectacle than the deep 
fissures in the flanks of the mountains, which seem to have 
burst forth in eruption to cover the plains with their ruins. 
These gorges, under the influence of the sun which cracks and 
shivers to fragments the very rocks, and of the rain which 
sweeps them down, penetrate deeper and deeper into the heart 
of the mountain, while the beds of the torrents issuing from 
them are sometimes raised several feet, in a single year, by 
the debris, so that they reach the level of the bridges, which, 
of course, are then carried off. The torrent beds are recog¬ 
nized at a great distance, as they issue from the mountains, 
and they spread themselves over the low grounds, in fan- 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


2-15 


shaped expansions, like a mantle of stone, sometimes ten thou¬ 
sand feet wide, rising high at the centre, and curving toward 
the circumference till their lower edges meet the plain. 

“ Such is their aspect in dry weather. But no tongue can 
give an adequate description of their devastations in one of 
those sudden floods which resemble, in almost none of their 
phenomena, the action of ordinary river water. They are now 
no longer overflowing brooks, but real seas, tumbling down in 
cataracts, and rolling before them blocks of stone, which are 
hurled forward by the shock of the waves like balls shot out by 
the explosion of gunpowder. Sometimes ridges of pebbles are 
driven down when the transporting torrent does not rise high 
enough to show itself, and then the movement is accompanied 
with a roar louder than the crash of thunder. A furious wind 
precedes the rushing water and announces its approach. Then 
conies a violent eruption, followed by a flow of muddy waves, 
and after a few hours all returns to the dreary silence which 
at periods of rest marks these abodes of desolation. 

“ This is but an imperfect sketch of this scourge of the 
Alps. Its devastations are increasing with the progress of 
clearing, and are every day turning a portion of our frontier 
departments into barren wastes. 

“ The unfortunate passion for clearing manifested itself at 
the beginning of the French Revolution, and has much in¬ 
creased under the pressure of immediate want. It has now 
reached an extreme point, and must be speedily checked, or 
the last inhabitant will be compelled to retreat when the last 
tree falls. 

“ The elements of destruction are increasing in violence. 
Rivers might be mentioned whose beds have been raised ten 
feet in a single year. The devastation advances in geomet¬ 
rical progression as the higher slopes are bared of their wood, 
and ‘the ruin from above,’ to use the words of a peasant, 
‘ helps to hasten the desolation below.’ 

“ The Alps of Provence present a terrible aspect. In the 
more equable climate of Northern France, one can form no 
conception of those parched mountain gorges where not even 


246 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


a bush can be found to shelter a bird, where, at most, the 
wanderer sees in summer here and there a withered lavender, 
where all the springs are dried up, and where a dead silence, 
hardly broken by even the hum of an insect, prevails. But if 
a storm bursts forth, masses of water suddenly shoot from the 
mountain heights into the shattered gulfs, waste without irri¬ 
gating, deluge without refreshing the soil they overflow in 
their swift descent, and leave it even more seared than it was 
from want of moisture. Man at last retires from the fearful 
desert, and I have, the present season, found not a living soul 
in districts where I remember to have enjoyed hospitality 
thirty years ago.” 

In 1853, ten years after the date of Blanqui’s memoir, M. 
de Bonville, prefect of the Lower Alps, addressed to the Gov¬ 
ernment a report in which the following passages occur : 

u It is certain that the productive mould of the Alps, swept 
off by the increasing violence of that curse of the mountains, 
the torrents, is daily diminishing with fearful rapidity. All 
our Alps are wholly, or in large proportion, bared of wood. 
Their soil, scorched by the sun of Provence, cut up by the 
hoofs of the sheep, which, not finding on the surface the grass 
they require for their sustenance, scratch the ground in search 
of roots to satisfy their hunger, is periodically washed and car¬ 
ried off by melting snows and summer storms. 

“ I will not dwell on the effects of the torrents. For sixty 
years they have been too often depicted to require to be 
further discussed, but it is important to show that their rav¬ 
ages are daily extending the range of devastation. The bed 
of the Durance, which now in some places exceeds 2,000 
metres [about 6,600 feet, or a mile and a quarter] in width, 
and, at ordinary times, has a current of water less than 10 
metres [about 33 feet] wide, shows something of the extent of 
the damage.* Where, ten years ago, there were still woods 

* In the days of the Eoman empire the Durance was a navigable river, 
with a commerce so important that the boatmen upon it formed a distinct 
corporation. —Ladoucette, Jlistoire , etc., des Hautes Alpes, p. 354. 

Even as early as 1789, the Durance was computed to have already 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


247 


and cultivated grounds to be seen, there is now but a vast 
torrent: there is not one of our mountains which has not at 
least one torrent, and new ones are daily forming. 

“ An indirect proof of the diminution of the soil is to be 
found in the depopulation of the country. In 1852, I re¬ 
ported to the General Council that, according to the census 
of that year, the population of the department of the Lower 
Alps had fallen off no less than 5,000 souls in the five years 
between 1846 and 1851. 

“ Unless prompt and energetic measures are taken, it is 
easy to fix the epoch when the French Alps will be but a 
desert. The interval between 1851 and 1856 will show a 
further decrease of population. In 1862, the ministry will 
announce a continued and progressive reduction in the num¬ 
ber of acres devoted to agriculture ; every year will aggravate 
the evil, and, in a half century, France will count more ruins, 
and a department the less.” 

Time has verified the predictions of De Bonville. The later 
census returns show a progressive diminution in the popula¬ 
tion of the departments of the Lower Alps, the Is&re, the 
Drome, Ariege, the Upper and the Lower Pyrenees, the 
Lozere, the Ardennes, the Doubs, the Yosges, and, in short, in 
all the provinces formerly remarkable for their forests. This 
diminution is not to be ascribed to a passion for foreign emi¬ 
gration, as in Ireland, and in parts of Germany and of Italy; 
it is simply a transfer of population from one part of the 
empire to another, from soils which human folly has rendered 
uninhabitable, by ruthlessly depriving them of their natural 
advantages and securities, to provinces where the face of the 
earth was so formed by nature as to need no such safeguards, 
and where, consequently, she preserves her outlines in spite of 
the wasteful improvidence of man.* 

covered with gravel and pebbles not less than 130,000 acres, “ which, but 
for its inundations, would have been the finest land in the province.”— 
Artiiur Young, Travels in France , vol. i, ch. i. 

* Between 1851 and 1856 the population of Languedoc and Provence 
had increased by 101,000 souls. The augmentation, however, was wholfy 


248 


ACTION OF TORRENTS. 


Highly colored as these pictures seem, they are not exag¬ 
gerated, although the hasty tourist through Southern France 
and Northern Italy, finding little in his high road experiences 
to justify them, might suppose them so. The lines of communi¬ 
cation by locomotive train and diligence lead generally over 
safer ground, and it is only when they ascend the Alpine 
passes and traverse the mountain chains, that scenes somewhat 
resembling those just described fall under the eye of the ordi¬ 
nary traveller. But the extension of the sphere of devastation, 
by the degradation of the mountains and the transportation 
of their debris, is producing analogous effects upon the lower 
ridges of the Alps and the plains which skirt them; and even 
now one needs but an hour’s departure from some great thor¬ 
oughfares to reach sites where the genius of destruction rev els 
as wildly as in the most frightful of the abysses which Blanqui 
has painted.* 

in tlie provinces of the plains, where all the principal cities are found. In 
these provinces the increase was 204,000, while in the mountain provinces 
there was a diminution of 103,000. The reduction of the area of arable 
land is perhaps even more striking. In 1842, the department of the Lower 
Alps possessed 99,000 hectares, or nearly 245,000 acres, of cultivated soil. 
In 1852, it had but 74,000 hectares. In other words, in ten years 25,000 
hectares, or 61,000 acres, had been washed away or rendered worthless 
for cultivation, by torrents and the abuses of pasturage. —Clave, Etudes, 

pp. 66, 67. 

* The Skalara-Tobel, for instance, near Coire. See the description in 
Berlepsch, Die Alpen , pp. 169 et seqq, or in Stephen’s English translation. 

The recent change in the character of the Mella—a river anciently so 
remarkable for the gentleness of its current that it was specially noticed 
by Catullus as flowing molli flumine —deserves more than a passing 
remark. This river rises in the mountain chain east of Lake Iseo, and 
traversing the district of Brescia, empties into the Oglio after, a course of 
about seventy miles. The iron works in the upper valley of the Mella had 
long created a considerable demand for wood, but their operations were 
not so extensive as to occasion any very sudden or general destruction of 
the forests, and the only evil experienced from the clearings was the grad¬ 
ual diminution of the volume of the river. Within the last twenty years, 
the superior quality of the arms manufactured at Brescia has greatly en¬ 
larged the sale of them, and very naturally stimulated the activity of both 
the forges and of the colliers who supply them, and the hillsides have been 


EXCAVATION BY TORRENTS. 


249 


There is one effect of the action of torrents which few trav¬ 
ellers on the Continent are heedless enough to pass without 
notice. I refer to the elevation of the beds of mountain 
streams in consequence of the deposit of the debris with which 
they are charged. To prevent the spread of sand and gravel 
over the fields and the deluging overflow of the raging waters, 
the streams are confined by walls and embankments, which are 
gradually built higher and higher as the bed of the torrent is 
raised, so that, to reach a river, you ascend from the fields 
beside it; and sometimes the ordinary level of the stream is 
above the streets and even the roofs of the towns through 
which it passes.* 

rapidly stripped of their timber. Up to 1850, no destructive inundation 
of the Mella had been recorded. Buildings in great numbers had been 
erected upon its margin, and its valley was conspicuous for its rural 
beauty and its fertility. But when the denudation of the mountains had 
reached a certain point, avenging nature began the work of retribution. 
In the spring and summer of 1850 several new torrents were suddenly 
formed in the upper tributary valleys, and on the 14th and 15th of August 
in that year, a fall of rain, not heavier than had been often experienced, 
produced a flood which not only inundated much ground never before 
overflowed, but destroyed a great number of bridges, dams, factories, and 
other valuable structures, and, what was a far more serious evil, swept 
off from the rocks an incredible extent of soil, and converted one of the 
most beautiful valleys of the Italian Alps into a ravine almost as bare and 
as barren as the savagest gorge of Southern France. The pecuniary 
damage was estimated at many millions of francs, and the violence of the 
catastrophe was deemed so extraordinary, even in a country subject to 
similar visitations, that the sympathy excited for the sufferers produced, in 
five months, voluntary contributions for their relief to the amount of 
nearly $200,000 .—Delle Inondazioni del Mella , etc., nella notte del 14 al 15 
Agosto , 1850. 

The author of this remarkable pamphlet has chosen as a motto a pas¬ 
sage from the Vulgate translation of Job, which is interesting as showing 
accurate observation of the action of the torrent: “ Mons cadens definit, 
et saxum transfertur de loco suo ; lapides excavant aqum et alluvione paul- 
latim terra consumitur.”— Job xiv, 18, 19. 

The English version is much less striking, and gives a different sense. 

* Streffleur quotes from Duile the following observations: “ The chan¬ 
nel of the Tyrolese brooks is often raised much above the valleys through 


250 


EXCAVATION BY TORRENTS. 


Tlie traveller who visits the depths of an Alpine ravine, 
observes the length and width of the gorge and the great 
height and apparent solidity of the precipitous walls which 
bound it, and calculates the mass of rock required to fill the 
vacancy, can hardly believe that the humble brooklet which 
purls at his feet has been the principal agent in accomplishing 
this tremendous erosion. Closer observation will often teach 
him, that the seemingly unbroken rock which overhangs the 
valley is full of cracks and fissures, and really in such a state 
of disintegration that every frost must bring down tons of it. 
If he compute the area of the basin which finds here its only 
discharge, he will perceive that a sudden thaw of the winter’s 
deposit of snow, or one of those terrible discharges of rain so 
common in the Alps, must send forth a deluge mighty enough 
to sweep down the largest masses of gravel and of rock.* 

which they flow. The bed of the Fersina is elevated high above the city 
of Trient, which lies near it. The Villerbacli flows at a much more 
elevated level than that of the market place of Neumarkt and Vill, and 
threatens to overwhelm both of them with its waters. The Talfer at 
Botzen is at least even with the roofs of the adjacent town, if not above 
them. The tower steeples of the villages of Schlanders, Kortsch, and 
Laas, are lower than the surface of the Gadribach. The Saldurbach at 
Schluderns menaces the far lower village with destruction, and the chief 
town, Schwaz, is in similar danger from the Lahnbach.” —Stkeffleuk, 
Ueber die Wildbache , etc., p. 7. 

* The snow drifts into the ravines and accumulates to incredible depths, 
and the water resulting from its dissolution and from the deluging rains 
which fall in spring, and sometimes in the summer, being confined by 
rocky walls on both sides, rises to a very great height, and of course 
acquires an immense velocity and transporting power in its rapid descent 
to its outlet from the mountain. In the winter of 1842-’3, the valley of 
the Doveria, along which the Simplon road passes, was filled with solid 
snowdrifts to the depth of a hundred feet above the carriage road, and the 
sledge track by which passengers and the mails were carried ran at that 
height. 

Other things being equal, the transporting power of the water is great¬ 
est where its flow is most rapid. This is usually in the direction of the 
axis of the ravine. As the current pours out of the gorge and escapes 
from the lateral confinement of its walls, it spreads and divides itself into 
numerous smaller streams, which shoot out from the mouth of the vallev. 


EXCAVATION BY TORRENTS. 


251 


Tlie simple measurement of the cubical contents of the semi¬ 
circular hillock which he climbed before he entered the gorge, 
the structure and composition of which conclusively show 
that it must have been washed out of this latter by torrential 
action, will often account satisfactorily for the disposal of most 
of the matter which once filled the ravine. 

It must further be remembered, that every inch of the 
violent movement of the rocks is accompanied with crushing 
concussion, or, at least, with great abrasion, and, as you follow 
the deposit along the course of the waters which transport it, 
you find the stones gradually rounding off in form, and dimin¬ 
ishing in size, until they pass successively into gravel, sand, 
impalpable slime. 

as from a centre, in different directions, like the ribs of a fan from the 
pivot, each carrying with it its quota of stones and gravel. The plain 
below the point of issue from the mountain is rapidly raised by newly 
formed torrents, the elevation depending on the inclination of the bed and 
the form and weight of the matter transported. Every flood both increases 
the height of this central point and extends the entire circumference of 
the deposit. The stream retaining most nearly the original direction moves 
with the greatest momentum, and consequently transports the solid matter 
with which it is charged to the greatest distance. 

The untravelled reader will comprehend this the better when he is in¬ 
formed that the southern slope of the Alps generally rises suddenly out of 
the plain, with no intervening hill to break the abruptness of the transition, 
except those consisting of comparatively small heaps of its own debris 
brought down by ancient glaciers or recent torrents. The torrents do not 
wind down valleys gradually widening to the rivers or the sea, but leap at 
once from the flanks of the mountains upon the plains below. This ar¬ 
rangement of surfaces naturally facilitates the formation of vast deposits at 
their points of emergence, and the centre of the accumulation in the case 
of very small torrents is not unfrequently a hundred feet high, and some¬ 
times very much more. 

Torrents and the rivers that receive them transport mountain debris to 
almost incredible distances. Lorentz, in an official report on this subject, 
as quoted by Marschand from the Memoirs of the Agricultural Society of 
Lyons, says: “ The felling of the woods produces torrents which cover 
the cultivated soil with pebbles and fragments of rock, and they do not 
confine their ravages to the vicinity of the mountains, but extend them 
into the fertile fields of Provence and other departments, to the distance 
of forty or fifty leagues .”—Entioaldung der Gebirgc, p. 17. 


252 


TRANSPORTING POWER OF RIVERS. 


I do not mean to assert tliat all the rocky valleys of the 
Alps have been produced by the action of torrents resulting 
from the destruction of the forests. All the greater, and many 
of the smaller channels, by which that chain is drained, owe 
their origin to higher causes. They are primitive fissures, 
ascribable to disruption in upheaval or other geological con¬ 
vulsion, widened and scarped, and often even polished, so to 
speak, by the action of glaciers during the ice period, and but 
little changed in form by running water in later eras.* 

In these valleys of ancient formation, which extend into 
the very heart of the mountains, the streams, though rapid, 
have lost the true torrential character, if, indeed, they ever 
possessed it. Their beds have become approximately constant, 
and their walls no longer crumble and fall into the waters that 
wash their bases. The torrent-worn ravines, of which I have 
spoken, are of later date, and belong more properly to what 
may be called the crust of the Alps, consisting of loose rocks, 
of gravel, and of earth, strewed along the surface of the great de¬ 
clivities of the central ridge, and accumulated thickly between 
their solid buttresses. But it is on this crust that the moun¬ 
taineer dwells. Here are his forests, here his pastures, and the 
ravages of the torrent both destroy his world, and convert it 
into a source of overwhelming desolation to the plains below. 


Transporting Power of Rivers. 

An instance that fell under my own observation in 1857, 
will serve to show something of the eroding and transporting 

* The precipitous walls of the Yal de Lys, and more especially of the 
Val Doveria, though here and there shattered, show in many places a 
smoothness of face over a large vertical plane, at the height of hundreds 
of feet above the bottom of the valley, which no known agency but glacier 
ice is capable of producing, and of course they can have undergone no sen¬ 
sible change at those points for a vast length of time. The beds of the 
rivers which flow through those valleys suffer lateral displacement occa¬ 
sionally, where there is room for the shifting of the channel; but if any ele¬ 
vation or depression takes place in them, it is too slow to be perceptible 
except in case of some merely temporary obstruction. 


TRANSPORTING POWER OF RIVERS. 


253 


power of streams which, in these respects, fall incalculably 
below the torrents of the Alps. In a flood of the Ottaque- 
chee, a small river wdiicli flows through Woodstock, Vermont, 
a millclam on that stream burst, and the sediment with wdiich 
the pond was filled, estimated after careful measurement at 
13,000 cubic yards, was carried down by the current. Between 
this dam and the slack water of another, four miles below, the 
bed of the stream, which is composed of pebbles interspersed 
iu a few places with larger stones, is about sixty-five feet wide, 
though, at low water, the breadth of the current is considerably 
less. The sand and fine gravel were smoothly and evenly dis¬ 
tributed over the bed to a width of fifty-five or sixty feet, and 
for a distance of about two miles, except at two or three inter¬ 
vening rapids, filling up all the interstices between the stones, 
covering them to the depth of nine or ten inches, so as to pre¬ 
sent a regularly formed concave channel, lined with sand, and 
reducing the depth of water, in some places, from five or six 
feet to fifteen or eighteen inches. Observing this deposit after 
the river had subsided and become so clear that the bottom 
could be seen, I supposed that the next flood would produce 
an extraordinary erosion of the banks, and some permanent 
changes in the channel of the stream, in consequence of the 
elevation of the bed and the filling up of the spaces between 
the stones through which formerly much water had flowed; 
but no such result followed. The spring freshet of the next 
year entirely washed out the sand its predecessor had depos¬ 
ited, carried it to ponds and still-water reaches below, and left 
the bed of the river almost precisely in its former condition, 
though, of course, with the slight displacement of the pebbles 
which every flood produces in the channels of such streams. 
The pond, though often previously discharged by the breakage 
of the dam, had then been undisturbed for about twenty-five 
years, and its contents consisted almost entirely of sand, the 
rapidity of the current in floods being such that it would let 
fall little lighter sediment, even above an obstruction like a 
dam. The quantity I have mentioned evidently bears a very 
inconsiderable proportion to the total erosion of the stream 


254 


THE RIVER PO. 


during that period, because the wash of the banks consists 
chiefly of fine earth rather than of sand, and after the pond 
was once filled, or nearly so, even this material could no longer 
be deposited in it. The fact of the complete removal of the 
deposit I have described between the two dams in a single 
freshet, shows that, in spite of considerable obstruction from 
roughness of bed, large quantities of sand may be taken up 
and carried off by streams of no great rapidity of inclination ; 
for the whole descent of the bed of the river between the two 
dams—a distance of four miles—is but sixty feet, or fifteen feet 
to the mile. 


The Po and its Deposits. 

The current of the river Po, for a considerable distance 
after its volume of water is otherwise sufficient for continuous 
navigation, is too rapid for that purpose until near Piacenza, 
where its velocity becomes too much reduced to transport 
great quantities of mineral matter, except in a state of minute 
division. Its southern affluents bring down from the Apen¬ 
nines a large quantity of fine earth from various geological 
formations, while its Alpine tributaries west of the Ticino are 
charged chiefly with rock ground down to sand or gravel.* 

* Lombardini found, twenty years ago, that the mineral matter brought 
down to the Po by its tributaries was, in genera], comminuted to about the 
same degree of fineness as the sands of its bed at their points of discharge. 
In the case of the Trebbia, which rises high in the Apennines and empties 
into the Po at Piacenza, it was otherwise, that river rolling pebbles and 
coarse gravel into the channel of the principal stream. The banks of the 
other affluents—excepting some of those which discharge their waters into 
the great lakes—then either retained their woods, or had been so long 
clear of them, that the torrents had removed most of the disintegrated 
and loose rock in their upper basins. The valley of the Trebbia had been 
recently cleared, and all the forces which tend to the degradation and 
transportation of rock were in full activity .—Notice sur les Rivieres de la 
Lombardie, Annales des Fonts et Chaussees , 1847, ler s6mestre, p. 131. 

Since the date of Lombardini’s observations, many Alpine valleys have 
been stripped of their woods. It would be interesting to know whether 
any sensible change has been produced in the character or quantity of the 
matter transported by them to the Po. 


SEDIMENT OP THE PO. 


255 


The bed of the river has been somewhat elevated by the de¬ 
posits in its channel, though not by any means above the level 
of the adjacent plains as has been so often represented. The 
dikes, which confine the current at high water, at the same 
time augment its velocity and compel it to carry most of its 
sediment to the Adriatic. It has, therefore, raised neither its 
own channel nor its alluvial shores, as it would have done if it 
had remained unconfined. But, as the surface of the water in 
floods is from six to fifteen feet above the general level of its 
banks, the Po can, at that period, receive no contributions of 
earth from the washing of the fields of Lombardy, and there is 
no doubt that a large proportion of the sediment it now de¬ 
posits at its mouth descended from the Alps in the form of 
rock, though reduced by the grinding action of the waters, in 
its passage seaward, to the condition of fine sand, and often 
of silt.* 

We know little of the history of the Po, or of the geog¬ 
raphy of the coast near the point where it enters the Adriatic, 
at any period more than twenty centuries before our own. 
Still less can we say how much of the plains of Lombardy had 
been formed by its action, combined with other causes, before 
man accelerated its levelling operations by felling the first 
woods on the mountains whence its waters are derived. But 
we know that since the Boman conquest of Northern Italy, its 
deposits have amounted to a quantity which, if recemented 
into rock, recombined into gravel, common earth, and vege¬ 
table mould, and restored to the situations where eruption or 
upheaval originally placed, or vegetation deposited it, would 
fill up hundreds of deep ravines in the Alps and Apennines, 
change the plan and profile of their chains, and give their 

* In proportion as tlie dikes are improved, and breaches and the escape 
of the water through them are less frequent, the height of the annual inun¬ 
dations is increased. Many towns on the banks of the river, and of course 
within the system of parallel embankments, were formerly secure from 
flood by the height of the artificial mounds on which they were built; but 
they have recently been obliged to construct ring dikes for theii piotec- 
tion.— Batjmgarten, after Lombardini, in the paper last quoted, pp. 141,147. 


256 


SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 


southern and northern faces respectively a geographical aspect 
very different from that they now present. Ravenna, forty 
miles south of the principal mouth of the Po, was built like 
Venice, in a lagoon, and the Adriatic still washed its walls at 
the commencement of the Christian era. The mud of the Po 
has filled up the lagoon, and Ravenna is now four miles from 
the sea. The town of Adria, which lies between the Po and 
the Adige, at the distance of some four or five miles from each, 
was once a harbor famous enough to have given its name to 
the Adriatic sea, and it was still a seaport in the time of Au¬ 
gustus. The combined action of the two rivers has so advanced 
the coast line that Adria is now about fourteen miles inland, 
and, in other places, the deposits made within the same period 
by these and other neighboring streams have a width of 
twenty miles. 

What proportion of the earth with which they are charged 
these rivers have borne out into deep water, during the last two 
thousand years, we do not know, but as they still transport 
enormous quantities, as the North Adriatic appears to have 
shoaled rapidly, and as long islands, composed in great part 
of fluviatile deposits, have formed opposite their mouths, it 
must evidently have been very great. The floods of the Po 
occur but once, or sometimes twice in a year.* At other 
times, its waters are comparatively limpid and seem to hold 
no great amount of mud or fine sand in mechanical suspension; 
but at high water it contains a large proportion of solid matter, 
and according to Lombardini, it annually transports to the 

* Three centuries ago, when the declivities of the mountains still re¬ 
tained a much larger proportion of their woods, the moderate annual floods 
of the Po were occasioned by the melting of the snows, and, as appears by 
a passage of Tasso quoted by Castellani ( Dell' Influenza delle Selve, i, p. 58, 
note), they took place in May. The much more violent inundations of the 
present century are due to rains, the waters of which are no longer retained 
by a forest soil, but conveyed at once to the rivers—and they occur almost 
uniformly in the autumn or late summer. Castellani, on the page just 
quoted, says that even so late as about 1780, the Po required a heavy rain 
of a week to overflow its banks, but that forty years later, it was some¬ 
times raised to full flood in a single day. 


SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 


257 


shores of the Adriatic not less than 42,760,000 cubic metres, 
or very nearly 55,000,000 cubic yards, which carries the coast 
line out into the sea at the rate of more than 200 feet in a 
year.* The depth of the annual deposit is stated at eighteen 
centimetres, or rather more than seven inches, and it would 
cover an area of not much less than ninety square miles' with 
a layer of that thickness. The Adige, also, brings every year 
to the Adriatic many million cubic yards of Alpine detritus, 
and the contributions of the Brenta from the same source are 
far from inconsiderable. The Adriatic, however, receives but 
a small proportion of the soil and rock washed away from the 
Italian slope of the Alps and the northern declivity of the 
Apennines by torrents. Nearly the whole of the debris thus 
removed from the southern face of the Alps between Monte 
Bosa and the sources of the Adda—a length of watershed not 
less than one hundred and fifty miles—is arrested by the still 
waters of the Lakes Maggiore and Como, and some smaller 
lacustrine reservoirs, and never reaches the sea. The Po is 
not continuously embanked except for the lower half of its 
course. Above Piacenza, therefore, it spreads and deposits 
sediment over a wide surface, and the water withdrawn from 
it for irrigation at lower points, as well as its inundations in 
the occasional ruptures of its banks, carry over the adjacent 
soil a large amount of slime. 

If we add to the estimated annual deposits of the Po at its 
mouth, the earth and sand transported to the sea by the Adige, 
the Brenta, and other less important streams, the prodigious 
mass of detritus swept into Lago Maggiore by the Tosa, the 
Maggia, and the Ticino, into the lake of Como by the Maira 

* This change of coast line cannot he ascribed to upheaval, for a com¬ 
parison of the level of old buildings—as, for instance, the church of San 
Vitale and the tomb of Theodoric at Eavenna—with that of the sea^ tends 
to prove a depression rather than an elevation of their foundations. 

A computation by a different method makes the deposits at the mouth 
of the Po 2,123,000 metres less ; but as both of them omit the gravel and 
silt rolled, if not floated, down at ordinary and low water, we are safe in 
assuming the larger quantity .—Article last quoted , p. 174. 

17 


258 


SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 


and the Adda, into the lake of Garda by its affluents, and the 
yet vaster heaps of pebbles, gravel, and earth permanently 
deposited by the torrents near their points of eruption from 
mountain gorges, or spread over the wide plains at lower 
levels, we may safely assume that we have an aggregate of not 
less than four times the quantity carried to the Adriatic by the 
Po, or 220,000,000 cubic yards of solid matter, abstracted every 
year from the Italian Alps and the Apennines, and removed 
out of their domain by the force of running water.* 

The present rate of deposit at the mouth of the Po has con¬ 
tinued since the year 1600, the previous advance of the coast, 
after the year 1200, having been only one third as rapid. The 
great increase of erosion and transport is ascribed by Lombar- 
dini chiefly to the destruction of the forests in the basin of that 
river and the valleys of its tributaries, since the beginning of 
the seventeenth century, f We have no data to show the rate 
of deposit in any given century before the year 1200, and it 
doubtless varied according to the progress of population and 
the consequent extension of clearing and cultivation. The 
transporting power of torrents is greatest soon after their for¬ 
mation, because at that time then* points of delivery are lower, 
and, of course, their general slope and velocity more rapid, 
than after years of erosion above, and deposit below, have 
depressed the beds of their mountain valleys, and elevated the 
channels of their lower course. Their eroding action also is 
most powerful at the same period, both because their mechan¬ 
ical force is then greatest, and because the loose earth and 

* Mengotti estimated the mass of solid matter annually “united 
to the waters of the Po ” at 822,000,000 cubic metres, or nearly twenty 
times as much as, according to Lombardini, that river delivers into the 
Adriatic. Castellani supposes the computation of Mengotti to fall much 
below the truth, and there can be no doubt that a vastly larger quantity 
of earth and gravel is washed down from the Alps and the Apennines than 
is carried to the sea.— Castellani, DelV Immediata Influenza delle Selve 
sul corso delle Acque , i, pp. 42, 43. 

I have contented myself with assuming less than one fifth of Mengotti’a 
estimate. 

t Baumgakten, An. des Fonts et Chaussees , 1847, ler s£mestre, p. 175. 


SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 


259 


stones of freshly cleared forest ground are most easily removed. 
Many of the Alpine valleys west of the Ticino—that of the 
Dora Baltea for instance—were nearly stripped of their forests 
in the days of the Roman empire, others in the Middle Ages, 
and, of course, there must have been, at different periods before 
the year 1200, epochs when the erosion and transportation of 
solid matter from the Alps and the Apennines were as great as 
since the year 1600. 

Upon the whole, we shall not greatly err if we assume 
that, for a period of not less than two thousand years, the 
walls of the basin of the Po—the Italian slope of the Alps, 
and the northern and northeastern declivities of the Apen¬ 
nines—have annually sent down into the Adriatic, the lakes, 
and the plains, not less than 150,000,000 cubic yards of earth 
and disintegrated rock. We have, then, an aggregate of 
300,000,000,000 cubic yards of such material, which, allowing 
to the mountain surface in question an area of 50,000,000,000 
square yards, would cover the whole to the depth of six yards.* 
There are very large portions of this area, where, as we know 
from ancient remains—roads, bridges, and the like—from 
other direct testimony, and from geological considerations, 
very little degradation has taken place within twenty cen¬ 
turies, and hence the quantity to be assigned to localities 
where the destructive causes have been most active is in¬ 
creased in proportion. 

If this vast mass of pulverized rock and earth were restored 
to the localities from which it was derived, it certainly would 
not obliterate valleys and gorges hollowed out by great geo¬ 
logical causes, but it would reduce the length and diminish 
the depth of ravines of later formation, modify the inclination 
of their walls, reclothe with earth many bare mountain ridges, 

* The total superficies of the basin of the Po, down to Ponte Lagoscuro 
[Ferrara]—a point where it has received all its affluents—is 6,988,200 hec¬ 
tares, that is, 4,105,600 in mountain lands, 2,832,600 in plain lands — 
Dumont, Travaux Publics , etc., p. 272. 

These latter two quantities are equal respectively to 10,145,348, and 
6,999,638 acres, or 15,852 and 10,937 square miles. 


2G0 


SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 


essentially change the line of junction between plain and 
mountain, and carry back a long reach of the Adriatic coast 
many miles to the west.* 

It is, indeed, not to be supposed that all the degradation 

* I do not use the numbers I have borrowed or assumed as factors the 
value of which is precisely ascertained; nor, for the purposes of the 
present argument, is quantitative exactness important. I employ numeri¬ 
cal statements simply as a means of aiding the imagination to form a 
general and certainly not extravagant idea of the extent of geographical 
revolutions which man has done much to accelerate, if not, strictly speak¬ 
ing, to produce. 

There is an old proverb, Dolus latet in generalibus , and Arthur Young 
is not the only public economist who has warned his readers against the 
deceitfulness of round numbers. I think, on the contrary, that vastly 
more error has been produced by the affectation of precision in cases where 
precision is impossible. In all the great operations of terrestrial nature, 
the elements are so numerous and so difficult of exact appreciation, that, 
until the means of scientific observation and measurement are much more 
perfected than they now are, we must content ourselves with general ap¬ 
proximations. I say terrestrial nature, because in cosmical movements we 
have fewer elements to deal with, and may therefore arrive at much more 
rigorous accuracy in determination of time and place than we can in fixing 
and predicting the quantities and the epochs of variable natural phenomena 
on the earth’s surface. 

The value of a high standard of accuracy in scientific observation can 
hardly be overrated ; but habits of rigorous exactness will never be formed 
by an investigator who allows himself to trust implicitly to the numerical 
precision of the results of a few experiments. The wonderful accuracy of 
geodetic measurements in modern times is, in general, attained by taking 
the mean of a great number of observations at every station, and this 
final precision is but the mutual balance and compensation of numerous 
errors. 

Travellers are often misled by local habits in the use of what may be 
called representative numbers, where a definite is put for an indefinite 
quantity. A Greek, who wished to express the notion of a great, but un¬ 
determined number, used “myriad, or ten thousand;” a Roman, “six 
hundred ; ” an Oriental, “ forty,” or, at present, very commonly, “ fifteen 
thousand.” Many a tourist has gravely repeated, as an ascertained fact, 
the vague statement of the Arabs and the monks of Mount Sinai, that the 
ascent from the convent of St. Catherine to the summit of Gebel Moosa 
counts “ fifteen thousand ” steps, though the difference of level is barely 
two thousand feet, and the “Forty” Thieves, the “forty” martyr monks 


SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 


261 


of the mountains is due to the destruction of the forests—that 
the flanks of every Alpine valley in Central Europe below the 
snow line were once covered with earth and green with woods, 
but there are not many particular cases, in which we can, with 
certainty, or even with strong probability, affirm the contrary. 

of the convent of El Arbain—not to speak of a similar use of this numeral 
in more important cases—have often been understood as expressions of a 
known number, when in fact they mean simply many. The number 
“ fifteen thousand” has found its way to Rome, and De Quincey seriously 
informs us, on the authority of a lady who had been at much pains to 
ascertain the exact truth, that, including closets large enough for a bed, the 
Vatican contains fifteen thousand rooms. Any one who has observed the 
vast dimensions of most of the apartments of that structure will admit that 
we make a very small allowance of space when we assign a square rod, 
sixteen and a half feet square, to each room upon the average. On an 
acre, there might be one hundred and sixty such rooms, including par¬ 
tition walls; and, to contain fifteen thousand of them, a building must 
cover more than nine acres, and be ten stories high, or possess other 
equivalent dimensions, which, as every traveller knows, many times ex¬ 
ceeds the truth. 

That most entertaining writer, About, reduces the number of rooms in 
the Vatican, but he compensates this reduction by increased dimensions, 
for he uses the word salle , which cannot be applied to closets barely large 
enough to contain a bed. According to him, there are in that “ presby- 
t£re,” as he irreverently calls it, twelve thousand large rooms [ salles ], 
thirty courts, and three hundred staircases.— Rome Contemporaire , p. 68. 

The pretended exactness of statistical tables is generally little better 
than an imposture ; and those founded not on direct estimation by compe¬ 
tent observers, but on the report of persons who have no particular inter¬ 
est in knowing, but often have a motive for distorting, the truth—such as 
census returns—are commonly to be regarded as but vague guesses at the 
actmil fact. 

Fuller, who, for the combination of wit, wisdom, fancy, and personal 
goodness, stands first in English literature, thus remarks on the preten¬ 
tious exactness of historical and statistical writers: “1 approve the plain, 
country By-word, as containing much Innocent Simplicity therein, 

‘ Almost and very nigh 
Have saved many a Lie' 

So have the Latines their prope, fere , juxta, circiter , plus minus , used 
in matters of fact by the most authentic Historians. Yea, we may observe 
that the Spirit of Truth itself, where Numbers and Measures are concerned, 


262 


ORIGIN OF RIVERS. 


We cannot measure the share ‘which human action has had 
in augmenting the intensity of causes of mountain degradation, 
but we know that the clearing of the woods has, in some cases, 
produced within two or three generations, effects as blasting 
as those generally ascribed to geological convulsions, and has 
laid waste the face of the earth more hopelessly than if it had 
been buried by a current of lava or a shower of volcanic sand. 
New torrents are forming every year in the Alps. Tradition, 
written records, and analogy concur to establish the belief that 
the ruin of most of the now desolate valleys in those mountains 
is to be ascribed to the same cause, and authentic descriptions 
of the irresistible force of the torrent show that, aided by frost 
and heat, it is adequate to level Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa 
themselves, unless new upheavals shall maintain their elevation. 

It has been contended that all rivers which take their rise 
in mountains originated in torrents. These, it is said, have 
lowered the summits by gradual erosion, and, with the ma¬ 
terial thus derived, have formed shoals in the sea which once 
beat against the cliffs ; then, by successive deposits, gradually 
raised them above the surface, and finally expanded them into 
broad plains traversed by gently flowing streams. If we could 
go back to earlier geological periods, we should find this theory 
often verified, and we cannot fail to see that the torrents go on 


in Times, Places, and Persons, useth the aforesaid Modifications, save in 
such cases where some mystery contained in the number requireth a par¬ 
ticular specification thereof: 


In Times. 
Daniel, 5 : S3. 
Luke, 3: 23. 


In Places. 
Luke, 24:13. 
John, 6:19. 


In Persons. 

Exodus, 12:37. 
Acts, 2:41. 


None therefore can justly find fault with me, if, on the like occasion, I 
have secured myself with the same Qualifications. Indeed, such Historians 
who grind their Intelligence to the powder of fraction, pretending to cleave 
the pin , do sometimes misse the But. Thus, one reporteth, how in the 
Persecution under Diocletian , there were neither under nor over, but just 
nine hundred ninety-nine martyrs. Yea, generally those that trade in 
such Retail-ware , and deal in such small parcells, may by the ignorant be 
commended for their care , but condemned by the judicious for their 
ridiculous curiosity.”—The History of the Worthies of England, i, p. 59. 




EXTINGUISHED TORRENTS. 


263 


at the present hour, depressing still lower the ridges of the 
Alps and the Apennines, raising still higher the plains of 
Lombardy and Provence, extending the coast still farther into 
the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, reducing the inclination 
of their own beds and the rapidity of their flow, and thus 
tending to become river-like in character. 

There are cases where torrents cease their ravages of them¬ 
selves, in consequence of some change in the condition of the 
•basin where they originate, or of the face of the mountain at a 
higher level, while the plain or the sea below remains in sub¬ 
stantially the same state as before. If a torrent rises in a 
small valley containing no great amount of earth and of disin¬ 
tegrated or loose rock, it may, in the course of a certain period, 
wash out all the transportable material, and if the valley is 
then left with solid walls, it will cease to furnish debris to be 
carried down by floods. If, in this state of things, a new 
channel be formed at an elevation above the head of the val¬ 
ley, it may divert a part, or even the whole of the rain water 
and melted snow which would otherwise have flowed into it, 
and the once furious torrent now sinks to the rank of a hum¬ 
ble and harmless brooklet. “ In traversing this department,” 
says Surell, a one often sees, at the outlet ot a gorge, a flat¬ 
tened hillock, with a fan-shaped outline and regular slopes ; it 
is the bed of dejection of an ancient torrent. It sometimes 
requires long and careful study to detect the primitive form, 
masked as it is by groves of trees, by cultivated fields, and 
often by houses, but, when examined closely, and from differ¬ 
ent points of view, its characteristic figure manifestly appears, 
and its true history cannot be mistaken. Along the hillock 
flows a streamlet, issuing from the ravine, and quietly watering 
the fields. This was originally a torrent, and in the back¬ 
ground may be discovered its mountain basin. Such extin¬ 
guished torrents, if I may use the expression, are numerous.” * 

* Surell, Les Torrents des Hautes Alpes , chap. xxiv. In such cases, 
the clearing of the ground, which, in consequence of a temporary diver¬ 
sion of the waters, or from some other cause, has become rewooded, some¬ 
times renews the ravages of the torrent. 3 hus, on the left bank of the 


2 64 


MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 


But for the intervention of man and domestic animals, these 
latter beneficent revolutions would occur more frequently, pro¬ 
ceed more rapidly. The new scarped mountains, the hillocks 
of debris, the plains elevated by sand and gravel spread over 
them, the shores freshly formed by fluviatile deposits, would 
clothe themselves with shrubs and trees, the intensity of the 
causes of degradation would be diminished, and nature would 
thus regain her ancient equilibrium. But these processes, 
under ordinary circumstances, demand, not years, generations,* 
but centuries; * and man, who even now finds scarce breathing 
room on this vast globe, cannot retire from the Old World to 
some yet undiscovered continent, and wait for the slow action 
of such causes to replace, by a new creation, the Eden he has 
wasted. 


Mountain Slides. 

I have said that the mountainous regions of the Atlantic 
States of the American Union are exposed to similar ravages, 
and I may add that there is, in some cases, reason to appre¬ 
hend from the same cause even more appalling calamities than 
those which I have yet described. The slide in the Notch of 
the White Mountains, by which the Willey family lost their 
lives, is an instance of the sort I refer to, though I am not able 
to say that in this particular case, the slip of the earth and 

Durance, a wooded declivity had been formed by the debris brought down 
by torrents, which had extinguished themselves after having swept off 
much of the superficial strata of the mountain of Morgon. “ All this dis¬ 
trict was covered with woods, which have now been thinned out and are 
perishing from day to day ; consequently, the torrents have recommenced 
their devastations, and if the clearings continue, this declivity, now fertile, 
will be ruined, like so many others.”—-Id., p. 155. 

* Where a torrent has not been long in operation, and earth still re¬ 
mains mixed with the rocks and gravel it heaps up at its point of eruption, 
vegetation often starts up and prospers, if protected from encroachment. 
In Provence, “ several communes determined, about ten years ago, to 
reserve the soils thus wasted, that is, to abandon them for a certain time, 
to spontaneous vegetation, which was not slow in making its appear¬ 
ance.”— Becquerei., jDcs Glimats , p. 315. 


MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 


265 


rock was produced by the denudation of the surface. It may 
have been occasioned by this cause, or by the construction of 
the road through the Notch, the excavations for which, per¬ 
haps, cut through the buttresses that supported the sloping 
strata above. 

Not to speak of the fall of earth when the roots which held 
it together, and the bed of leaves and mould which sheltered 
it both from disintegrating frost and from sudden drenching 
-and dissolution by heavy showers, are gone, it is easy to see 
that, in a climate with severe winters, the removal of the for¬ 
est, and, consecpiently, of the soil it had contributed to form, 
might cause the displacement and descent of great masses of 
rock. The woods, the vegetable mould, and the soil beneath 
protect the rocks they cover from the direct action of heat and 
cold, and from the expansion and contraction which accom¬ 
pany them. Most rocks, while covered with earth, contain a 
considerable quantity of water.* A fragment of rock per¬ 
vaded with moisture cracks and splits, if thrown into a fur¬ 
nace, and sometimes with a loud detonation; and it is a familiar 
observation that the fire, in burning over newly cleared lands, 
breaks up and sometimes almost pulverizes the stones. This 
effect is due partly to the unequal expansion of the stone, partly 
to the action of heat on the water it contains in its pores. The 
sun, suddenly let in upon rock which had been covered with 
moist earth for centuries, produces more or less disintegration 
in the same way, and the stone is also exposed to chemical 
influences from which it was sheltered before. But in the 
climate of the United States as well as of the Alps, frost is a 
still more powerful agent in breaking up mountain masses. 

* Rock is permeable by water to a greater extent than is generally sup¬ 
posed. Freshly quarried marble, and even granite, as well as most other 
stones, are sensibly heavier, as well as softer and more easily wrought, 
than after they are dried and hardened by air-seasoning. Many sand¬ 
stones are porous enough to serve as filters for liquids, and much of that 
of Upper Egypt and Nubia hisses audibly when thrown into water, from 
the escape of the air forced out of it by hydrostatic pressure and the 
capillary attraction of the pores for water. 


266 


MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 


The soil that protects the lime and sand stone, the slate and 
the granite from the influence of the sun, also prevents the 
water which filters into their crevices and between their strata 
from freezing in. the hardest winters, and the moisture de¬ 
scends, in a liquid form, until it escapes in springs, or passes 
off by deep subterranean channels. But when the ridges are 
laid bare, the water of the autumnal rains fills the minutest 
pores and veins and fissures and lines of separation of the 
rocks, then suddenly freezes, and bursts asunder huge, and 
apparently solid blocks of adamantine stone.* Where the 
strata are inclined at a considerable angle, the freezing of a 
thin film of water over a large interstratal area might occasion 
a slide that should cover miles with its ruins; and similar 
results might be produced by the simple hydrostatic pressure 
of a column of water, admitted by the removal of the covering 
of earth to flow into a crevice faster than it could escape 
through orifices below. 

Earth or rather mountain slides, compared to which the 
catastrophe that buried the Willey family in New Hampshire 
was but a pinch of dust, have often occurred in the Swiss, 
Italian, and French Alps. The land slip, which overwhelmed, 


* Palissy had observed the action of frost in disintegrating rock, and he 
thus describes it, in his essay on the formation of ice: “I know that the 
stones of the mountains of Ardennes be harder than marble. Neverthe¬ 
less, the people of that country do not quarry the said stones in winter, for 
that they be subject to frost; and many times the rocks have been seen to 
fall without being cut, by means whereof many people have been killed, 
when the said rocks were thawing.” Palissy was ignorant of the expan¬ 
sion of water in freezing—in fact he supposed that the mechanical force 
exerted by freezing water was due to compression, not dilatation—and 
therefore he ascribes to thawing alone effects resulting not less from con¬ 
gelation. 

Various forces combine to produce the stone avalanches of the higher 
Alps, the fall of which is one of the greatest dangers incurred by the ad¬ 
venturous explorers of those regions—the direct action of the sun upon 
the stone, the expansion of freezing water, and the loosening of masses 
of rock by the thawing of the ice which supported them or held them 
together. 


MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 


267 


and covered to the depth of seventy feet, the town of Plurs in 
the valley of the Maira, on the night of the 4th of September, 
1618, sparing not a soul of a population of 2,430 inhabitants, 
is one of the most memorable of these catastrophes, and the 
fall of the Rossberg or Rufiberg, which destroyed the little town 
of Goldan in Switzerland, and 450 of its people, on the 2d of 
September, 1806, is almost equally celebrated. In 1771, ac¬ 
cording to Wessely, the mountain peak Piz, near Alleglie in 
the province of Belluno, slipped into the bed of the Cordevole, 
a tributary of the Piave, destroying in its fall three hamlets 
and sixty lives. The rubbish filled the valley for a distance 
of nearly two miles, and, by damming up the waters of the 
Cordevole, formed a lake about three miles long, and a hun¬ 
dred and fifty feet deep, which still subsists, though reduced 
to half its original length by the wearing down of its outlet.* 
On the 14th of February, 1855, the hill of Belmonte, a little 
below the parish of San Stefano, in Tuscany, slid into the val¬ 
ley of the Tiber, which consequently flooded the village to the 
depth of fifty feet, and was finally drained off by a tunnel. 
The mass of debris is stated to have been about 3,500 feet 
long, 1,000 wide, and not less than 600 high.f 

Such displacements of earth and rocky strata rise to the 
magnitude of geological convulsions, but they are of so rare 
occurrence in countries still covered by the primitive forest, so 
common where the mountains have been stripped of their 
native covering, and, in many cases, so easily explicable by 
the drenching of incohesive earth from rain, or the free admis¬ 
sion of water between the strata of rocks—both of which a 
coating of vegetation would have prevented—that we are jus¬ 
tified in ascribing them for the most part to the same cause as 

* Wessely, Die Oesterreichischen Alpenldnder und ihre Forste , pp. 125, 
126. Wessely records several other more or less similar occurrences in 
the Austrian Alps. Some of them, certainly, are not to he ascribed to the 
removal of the woods, but in most cases they are clearly traceable to that 
cause. 

t Bianohi, Appendix to the Italian translation of Mrs. Somerville’s 
Physical Geography, p. xxxvi. 


268 


MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 


tliat to which the destructive effects of mountain torrents are 
chiefly due—the felling of the w r oods. 

In nearly every case of this sort the circumstances of which 
are known, the immediate cause of the slip lias been, either an 
earthquake, the imbibition of water in large quantities by bare 
earth, or its introduction between or beneath solid strata. If 
water insinuates itself between the strata, it creates a sliding 
surface, or it may, by its expansion in freezing, separate beds 
of rock, which had been nearly continuous before, widely 
enough to allow the gravitation of the superincumbent mass 
to overcome the resistance afforded by inequalities of face and 
by friction ; if it finds its way beneath hard earth or rock 
reposing on clay or other bedding of similar properties, it con¬ 
verts the supporting layer into a semi-fluid mud, which opposes 
no obstacle to the sliding of the strata above. 

The upper part of the mountain which buried Goldau was 
composed of a hard but brittle conglomerate, called nagelflue , 
resting on an unctuous clay, and inclining rapidly toward the 
village. Much earth remained upon the rock, in irregular 
masses, but the woods had been felled, and the water had free 
access to the surface, and to the crevices which sun and frost 
had already produced in the rock, and of course, to the slimy 
stratum beneath. The whole summer of 1806 had been very 
wet, and an almost incessant deluge of rain had fallen the day 
preceding the catastrophe, as well as on that of its occurrence. 
All conditions then, were favorable to the sliding of the rock, 
and, in obedience to the laws of gravitation, it precipitated itself 
into the valley as soon as its adhesion to the earth beneath it 
was destroyed by the conversion of the latter into a viscous 
paste. The mass that fell measured between two and a half 
and three miles in length by one thousand feet in width, and 
its average thickness is thought to have been about a hundred 
feet. The highest portion of the mountain was more than 
three thousand feet above the village, and the momentum 
acquired by the rocks and earth in their descent carried huge 
blocks of stone far up the opposite slope of the Rigi. 

The Piz, which fell into the Cordevole, rested on a steeply 


PROTECTION AGAINST AVALANCHES. 269 

inclined stratum ot limestone, with a thin layer of calcareous 
marl intervening, which, by long exposure to frost and the 
infiltration ot water, had lost its original consistence, and 

become a loose and slippery mass instead of a cohesive and 
tenacious bed. 

Protection against fall of Pocks and Avalanches by Trees. 

Forests often subserve a valuable purpose in preventing 
the fall ot rocks, by mere mechanical resistance. Trees, as 
well as herbaceous vegetation, grow in the Alps upon declivi¬ 
ties of surprising steepness of inclination, and the traveller sees 
both luxuriant grass and flourishing woods on slopes at which 
the soil, in the dry air of lower regions, would crumble and 
fall by the weight of its own particles. When loose rocks lie 
scattered on the face of these declivities, they are held in place 
by the trunks of the trees, and it is very common to observe a 
stone that weighs hundreds of pounds, perhaps even tons, rest- 
ing against a tree wdiich has stopped its progress just as it was 
beginning to slide down to a lower level. When a forest in 
such a position is cut, these blocks lose their support, and a 
single wet season is enough not only to bare the face of a con¬ 
siderable extent of rock, but to cover with earth and stone 
many acres of fertile soil below.* 

In Switzerland and other snowy and mountainous coun¬ 
tries, forests render a most important service by preventing 
the formation and fall of destructive avalanches, and in many 
parts of the Alps exposed to this catastrophe, the woods are 
protected, though too often ineffectually, by law. No forest, 
indeed, could arrest a large avalanche once in motion, but the 
mechanical resistance afforded by the trees prevents their 

* See in Kohl, Alpenreisen , i, 120, an account of the ruin of fields and 
pastures, and even of the destruction of a broad belt of forest, by the fall 
of rocks in consequence of cutting a few large trees. Cattle are very often 
killed in Switzerland by rock avalanches, and their owners secure them¬ 
selves from loss by insurance against this risk as against damage by fire 
or hail. 



270 CAUSES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WOODS. 

formation, both by obstructing the wind, which gives to the 
dry snow of the Staub-Lawine , or dust avalanche, its first 
impulse, and by checking the disposition of moist snow to 
gather itself into what is called the Putsch-Lawine , or sliding 
avalanche. Marschand states that, the very first winter after 
the felling of the trees on the higher part of a declivity be¬ 
tween Saanen and Gsteig, where the snow had never been 
known to slide, an avalanche formed itself in the clearing, 
thundered down the mountain, and overthrew and carried with 
it a hitherto unviolated forest to the amount of nearly a million 
cubic feet of timber.* The path once opened down the flanks 
of the mountain, the evil is almost beyond remedy. The snow 
sometimes carries off the earth from the face of the rock, or, if 
the soil is left, fresh slides every winter destroy the young 
plantations, and the restoration of the wood becomes impos¬ 
sible. The track widens with every new avalanche. Dwell¬ 
ings and their occupants are buried in the snow, or swept 
away by the rushing mass, or by the furious blasts it occasions 
through the displacement of the air; roads and bridges are 
destroyed; rivers blocked up, which swell till they overflow 
the valley above, and then, bursting their snowy barrier, flood 
the fields below with all the horrors of a winter inundation.f 

Principal Causes of the Destruction of the Forest. 

The needs of agriculture are the most familiar cause of the 
destruction of the forest in new countries; for not only does 
an increasing population demand additional acres to grow the 

* Entwaldung der Gebirge , p. 41. 

t The importance of the wood in preventing avalanches is well illus¬ 
trated by the fact that, where the forest is wanting, the inhabitants of 
localities exposed to snow slides often supply the place of the trees by 
driving stakes through the snow into the ground, and thus checking its 
propensity to slip. The woods themselves are sometimes thus protected 
against avalanches originating on slopes above them, and as a further 
security, small trees are cut down along the upper line of the forest, and 
laid against the trunks of larger trees, transversely to the path of the 
slide, to serve as a fence or dam to the motion of an incipient avalanche, 


THE LUMBER TRADE. 


271 


vegetables which feed it and its domestic animals, but the slov¬ 
enly husbandry of the border settler soon exhausts the lux¬ 
uriance of his first fields, and compels him to remove his 
household gods to a fresher soil. With growing numbers, too, 
come the many arts for which wood is the material. The 
demands of the near and the distant market for this product 
excite the cupidity of the hardy forester, and a few years of 
that wild industry of which Springer’s “ Forest Life and For¬ 
est Trees ” so vividly depicts the dangers and the triumphs, 
suffice to rob the most inaccessible glens of their fairest orna¬ 
ments. The value of timber increases with its dimensions in 
almost geometrical proportion, and the tallest, most vigorous, 
and most symmetrical trees fall the first sacrifice. This is a 
fortunate circumstance for the remainder of the wood; for the 
impatient lumberman contents himself with felling a few of 
the best trees, and then hurries on to take his tithe of still 
virgin groves. 

The unparalleled facilities for internal navigation, afforded 
by the numerous rivers of the present and former British colo¬ 
nial possessions in North America, have proved very fatal to 
the forests of that continent. Quebec has become a centre for 
a lumber trade, which, in the bulk of its material, and, conse¬ 
quently, in the tonnage required for its transportation, rivals 
the commerce of the greatest European cities. Immense rafts 
are collected at Quebec from the great Lakes, from the Ottawa, 
and from all the other tributaries which unite to swell the cur¬ 
rent of the St. Lawrence and help it to struggle against its 
mighty tides.* Ships, of burden formerly undreamed of, have 
been built to convey the timber to the markets of Europe, and 
during the summer months the St. Lawrence is almost as 

which may by this means be arrested before it acquires a destructive 
velocity and force. 

* The tide rises at Quebec to the height of twenty-five feet, and when 
it is aided by a northeast wind, it flows with almost irresistible violence. 
Rafts containing several hundred thousand cubic feet ot timber are often 
caught by the flood tide, torn to pieces, and dispersed for miles along the 
shores. 


272 


THE LUMBER TRADE. 


crowded with vessels as the Thames.* Of late, Chicago, in 
Illinois, has been one of the greatest lumber as well as grain 
depots of the United States, and it receives and distributes 
contributions from all the forests in the States w T ashed by Lake 
Michigan, as well as from some more distant points. 

The operations of the lumberman involve other dangers to 
the woods besides the loss of the trees felled by him. The 
narrow clearings around his shanties f form openings which let 
in the wind, and thus sometimes occasion the overthrow of 
thousands of trees, the fall of which dams up small streams, 
and creates bogs by the spreading of the waters, while the 
decaying trunks facilitate the multiplication of the insects 
which breed in dead wood, and are, some of them, inj urious to 
living trees. The escape and spread of camp fires, however, is 
the most devastating of all the causes of destruction that find 
their origin in the operations of the lumberman. The propor¬ 
tion of trees fit for industrial uses is small in all primitive 
woods. Only these fall before the forester’s axe, but the fire 
destroys, indiscriminately, every age and every species of tree.:): 

* One of these, the Baron of Renfrew—so named from one of the titles 
of the kings of England—built thirty or forty years ago, measured 5,000 
tons. They were little else than rafts, being almost solid masses of timber 
designed to be taken to pieces and sold as lumber on arriving at their port 
of destination. 

The lumber trade at Quebec is still very hu’ge. According to a recent 
article in the Revue des Deux Mondes , that city exported, in 1860, 30,000,000 
cubic feet of squared timber, and 40.0,000,000 square feet of “ planches.’ 
The thickness of the boards is not stated, but I believe they are generally 
cut an inch and a quarter thick for the Quebec trade, and as they shrink 
somewhat in drying, we may estimate ten square for one cubic foot 
of boards. This gives a total of 70,000,000 cubic feet. The specific 
gravity of white pine is .554, and the weight of this quantity of lumber, 
very little of which is thoroughly seasoned, would exceed a million of tons, 
even supposing it to consist wholly of wood as light as pine. New Bruns¬ 
wick, too, exports a large amount of lumber. 

t This name, from the French chantier , which has a wider meaning, is 
applied in America to temporary huts or habitations erected for the con¬ 
venience of forest life, or in connection with works of material improvement. 

} Trees differ much in their power of resisting the action of forest fires. 


THE LUMBER TRADE. 


273 


While, then, without much injury to the younger growths, the 
native forest will bear several u cuttings over ” in a generation 
—for the increasing value of lumber brings into use, every 
four or five years, a quality of timber which had been before 
rejected as unmarketable—a fire may render the declivity of a 
mountain unproductive for a century.* 

Different woods vary greatly in combustibility, and even when their bark 
is scarcely scorched, they are, partly in consequence of physiological char¬ 
acter, and partly from the greater or less depth at which their roots habit¬ 
ually lie below the surface, very differently affected by running fires. The 
white pine, Pinus strobus , as it is the most valuable, is also perhaps the 
most delicate tree of the American forest, while its congener, the Northern 
pitch pine, Pinus rigida , is less injured by fire than any other tree of that 
country. I have heard experienced lumbermen maintain that the growth 
of this pine was even accelerated by a fire brisk enough to destroy all 
other trees, and I have myself seen it still flourishing after a conflagration 
which had left not a green leaf but its own in the wood, and actually 
throwing out fresh foliage, when the old had been quite burnt off and the 
bark almost converted into charcoal. The wood of the pitch pine is of 
comparatively little value for the joiner, but it is useful for very many pur¬ 
poses. Its rapidity of growth in even poor soils, its hardihood, and its 
abundant yield of resinous products, entitle it to much more consideration, 
as a plantation tree, than it has hitherto received in Europe or America. 

* Between fifty and sixty years ago, a steep mountain with which I am 
very familiar, composed of metamorphic rock, and at that time covered 
with a thick coating of soil and a dense primeval forest, was accidentally 
burnt over. The fire took place in a very dry season, the slope of the 
mountain was too rapid to retain much water, and the conflagration was 
of an extraordinarily fierce character, consuming the wood almost entirely, 
burning the leaves and combustible portion of the mould, and in many 
places cracking and disintegrating the rock beneath. The rains of the fol¬ 
lowing autumn carried off much of the remaining soil, and the mountain 
side was nearly bare of wood for two or three years afterward. At 
length, a new crop of trees sprang up and grew vigorously, and the moun¬ 
tain is now thickly covered again. But the depth of mould and earth is 
too small to allow the trees to reach maturity. When they attain to the 
diameter of about six inches, they uniformly die, and this they will no 
doubt continue to do until the decay of leaves and wood on the surface, 
and the decomposition of the subjacent rock, shall have formed, perhaps 
hundreds of years hence, a stratum of soil thick enough to support a full- 
grown forest. 


18 


374 


AMERICAN FOREST TREES. 


American Forest Trees. 

The remaining forests of the Northern States and of Can¬ 
ada no longer boast the mighty pines which almost rivalled the 
gigantic Sequoia of California; and the growth of the larger 
forest trees is so slow, after they have attained to a certain 
size, that if every pine and oak were spared for two centuries, 
the largest now standing would not reach the stature of hun¬ 
dreds recorded to have been cut within two or three genera¬ 
tions.* Dr. Williams, who wrote about sixty years ago, states 
the following as the dimensions of “ such trees as are esteemed 
large ones of their kind in that part of America ” [Yermont], 
qualifying his account with the remark that his measurements 
t£ do not denote the greatest which nature bas produced of 

* The growth of the white pine, on a good soil and in open ground, is 
rather rapid until it reaches the diameter of a couple of feet, after which it 
is much slower. The favorite habitat of this tree is light sandy earth. On 
this soil, and in a dense wood, it requires a century to attain the diameter 
of a yard. Emerson (Trees of Massachusetts, p. 65), says that a pine of this 
species, near Paris, “ thirty years planted, is eighty feet high, with a diameter 
of three feet.” He also states that ten white pines planted at Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, in 1809 or 1810, exhibited, in the winter of 1841 and 1842, 
an average of twenty inches diameter at the ground, the two largest 
measuring, at the height of three feet, four feet eight inches in circumfer¬ 
ence ; and he mentions another pine growing in a rocky swamp, which, 
at the age of thirty-two years, “ gave seven feet in circumference at the 
but, with a height of sixty-two feet six inches.” This latter I suppose to 
be a seedling, the others transplanted trees, which might have been some 
years old when placed where they finally grew. 

The following case came under my own observation: In 1824, a pine 
tree, so small that a young lady, with the help of a lad, took it up from 
the ground and carried it a quarter of a mile, was planted near a house 
in a town in Vermont. It was occasionally watered, but received no 
other special treatment. I measured this tree in 1860, and found it, at 
four feet from the ground, and entirely above the spread of the roots, two 
feet and four inches in diameter. It could not have been more than three 
inches through when transplanted, and must have increased its diameter 
twenty-five inches in thirty-six years. 


AMERICAN FOREST TREES. 


275 


their particular species, but the greatest which are to be found 
in most of our towns.” 


Diameter. 

Pine,.6 feet, 

Maple, .5 “ 9 inches, 

Buttonwood, ... 5 “ 6 “ 

Elm, .5 “ 

Hemlock,.4 “ 9 “ 

Oak,.4 “ 

Basswood, .... 4 “ 

Ash,.4 “ 

Birch,.4 “ 


Height. 

247 feet. 


From 100 to 200 feet. 


He adds a note saying that a white pine was cut in Dun¬ 
stable, Hew Hampshire, in the year 1736, the diameter of 
which was seven feet and eight inches. Dr. Dwight says that 
a fallen pine in Connecticut was found to measure two hun¬ 
dred and forty-seven feet in height, and adds : “ A few years 
since, such trees were in great numbers along the northern 
parts of Connecticut River.” In another letter, he speaks of 
the white pine as u frequently six feet in diameter, and two 
hundred and fifty feet in height,” and states that a pine had 
been cut in Lancaster, Hew Hampshire, which measured two 
hundred and sixty-four feet. Emerson wrote in 1846 : “ Fifty 
years ago, several trees growing on rather dry land in Bland- 
ford, Massachusetts, measured, after they were felled, two 
hundred and twenty-three feet. All these trees are surpassed 
by a pine felled at Hanover, Hew Hampshire, about a hundred 
years ago, and described as measuring two hundred and sev¬ 
enty-four feet.* 

These descriptions, it will be noticed, apply to trees cut 
from sixty to one hundred years since. Persons, whom ob¬ 
servation has rendered familiar with the present character of 
the American forest, will be struck with the smallness of the 
diameter which Dr. Williams and Dr. Dwight ascribe to trees 


* Williams, History of Vermont, ii, p. 53. Dwight’s Travels, iv, p. 21, 
and iii, p. 36. Emerson, Trees of Massachusetts, p. 61. Parish, Life of 
President Wheelock, p. 56. 









AMERICAN FOREST TREES. 


276 

of such extraordinary height. Individuals of the several spe¬ 
cies mentioned in Dr. Williams’s table, are now hardly to be 
found in the same climate, exceeding one half or at most two 
thirds of the height which he assigns to them ; but, except in 
the case of the oak and the pine, the diameter stated by him 
would not be thought very extraordinary in trees of far less 
height, now standing. Even in the species I have excepted, 
those diameters, with half the heights of Dr. Williams, might 
perhaps be paralleled at the present time ; and many elms, 
transplanted, at a diameter of six inches, within the memory 
of persons still living, measure six, and sometimes even seven 
feet through. For this change in the growth of forest trees 
there are two reasons: the one is, that the great commercial 
value of the pine and the oak have caused the destruction of 
all the best—that is, the tallest and straightest—specimens of 
both ; the other, that the thinning of the woods by the axe of 
the lumberman has allowed the access of light and heat and 
air to trees of humbler worth and lower stature, which have 
survived their more towering brethren. These, consequently, 
have been able to expand their crowns and swell their stems 
to a degree not possible so long as they were overshadowed 
and stifled by the lordly oak and pine. While, therefore, the 
New England forester must search long before he finds a pine 

fit to be the mast 
Of some great ammiral, 

beeches and elms and birches, as sturdy as the mightiest of 
their progenitors, are still no rarity.* 

* The forest trees of the Northern States do not attain to extreme lon¬ 
gevity in the dense woods. Dr. Williams found that none of the huge 
pines, the age of which he ascertained, exceeded three hundred and fifty 
or four hundred years, though he quotes a friend who thought he had 
noticed trees considerably older. The oak lives longer than the pine, and 
the hemlock spruce is perhaps equally long lived. A tree of this latter 
species, cut within my knowledge in a thick wood, counted four hundred and 
eighty-six, or, according to another observer, five hundred annual circles. 

Great luxuriance of animal and vegetable production is not commonly 
accompanied by long duration of the individual. The oldest men are not 


FLOATING OF TIMBER. 


277 


Another evil, sometimes of serious magnitude, which at¬ 
tends the operations of the lumberman, is the injury to the 
banks of rivers from the practice of floating. I do not here 
allude to rafts, which, being under the control of those who 
navigate them, may be so guided as to avoid damage to the 
shore, but to masts, logs, and other pieces of timber singly 
intrusted to the streams, to be conveyed by their currents to 
sawmill ponds, or to convenient places for collecting them 
into rafts. The lumbermen usually haul the timber to the 
banks of the rivers in the winter, and when the spring floods 
swell the streams and break up the ice, they roll the logs into 
the water, leaving them to float down to their destination. If 
the transporting stream is too small to furnish a sufficient chan¬ 
nel for this rude navigation, it is sometimes dammed up, and 
the timber collected in the pond thus formed above the dam. 
When the pond is full, a sluice is opened, or the dam is blown 
up or otherwise suddenly broken, and the whole mass of lum¬ 
ber above it is hurried down w T ith the rolling flood. Both of 
these modes of proceeding expose the banks of the rivers 
employed as channels of flotation to abrasion,* and in some of 

found in the crowded city; and in the tropics, where life is prolific and 
precocious, it is also short. The most ancient forest trees of which we 
have accounts have not been those growing in thick woods, but isolated 
specimens, with no taller neighbor to intercept the light and heat and air, 
and no rival to share the nutriment afforded by the soil. 

The more rapid growth and greater dimensions of trees standing near 
the boundary of the forest, are matters of familiar observation. “ Long 
experience has shown that trees growing on the confines of the wood may 
be cut at sixty years of age as advantageously as others of the same 
species, reared in the depth of the forest, at a hundred and twenty. We 
have often remarked, in our Alps, that the trunk of trees upon the border 
of a grove is most developed or enlarged upon the outer or open side, 
where the branches extend themselves farthest, while the concentric 
circles of growth are most uniform in those entirely surrounded by other 
trees, or standing entirely alone.”—A. and G. Villa, Becessitco dei Boschi, 

pp. 17, 18. 

* Caimi states that “ a single flotation in the Valtelline in 1839, caused 
damages alleged to amount to more than $800,000, and actually appraised 
at $250,000 .”—Cenni sulla Importanza e Goltura dei Boschi , p. 65. 


278 


CAUSES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST. 


the American States it has been found necessary to protect, by 
special legislation, the lands through which they flow from the 
serious injury sometimes received through the practices I have 
described.* 

Special Causes of the Destruction of European Woods. 

The causes of forest waste thus far enumerated are more 
or less common to both continents; but in Europe extensive 
woods have, at different periods, been deliberately destroyed 

* Most physicists who have investigated the laws of natural hydraulics 
maintain that, in consequence of direct obstruction and frictional resistance 
to the flow of the water of rivers along their hanks, there is both an in¬ 
creased rapidity of current and an elevation of the water in the middle of 
the channel, so that a river presents always a convex surface. The lum¬ 
bermen deny this. They affirm that, while rivers are rising, the water is 
highest in the middle of the channel, and tends to throw floating objects 
shoreward ; while they are falling, it is lowest in the middle, and floating 
objects incline toward the centre. Logs, they say, rolled into the water 
during the rise, are very apt to lodge on the banks, while those set afloat 
during the falling of the waters keep in the current, and are carried 
without hindrance to their destination. 

Foresters and lumbermen, like sailors and other persons whose daily 
occupations bring them into contact, and often into conflict, with great 
natural forces, have many peculiar opinions, not to say superstitions. In 
one of these categories we must rank the universal belief of lumbermen, 
that with a given head of water, and in a given number of hours, a saw¬ 
mill cuts more lumber by night than by day. Having been personally 
interested in several sawmills, I have frequently conversed with sawyers 
on this subject, and have always been assured by them that their uniform 
experience established the fact that, other things being equal, the a-ction 
of the machinery of sawmills is more rapid by night than by day. I am 
sorry—perhaps I ought to be ashamed—to say that my scepticism has 
been too strong to allow me to avail myself of my opportunities of testing 
this question by passing a night, watch in hand, counting the strokes of a 
millsaw. More unprejudiced, and I must add, very intelligent and credi¬ 
ble persons have informed me that they have done so, and found the 
report of the sawyers abundantly confirmed. A land surveyor, who was 
also an experienced lumberman, sawyer, and machinist, a good mathemati¬ 
cian and an exact observer, has repeatedly told me, that he had very often 
“ timed ” sawmills, and found the difference in favor of night work above 
thirty per cent. Sed queere. 


CAUSES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST. 279 

by fire or tlie axe, because they afforded a retreat to enemies, 
robbers, and outlaws, and this practice is said to have been 
resorted to in the Mediterranean provinces of France as re¬ 
cently as the time of Napoleon I.* The severe and even san¬ 
guinary legislation, by which some of the governments of 
mediaeval Europe, as well as of earlier ages, protected the 
woods, was dictated by a love of the chase, or the fear of a 
scarcity of fuel and timber. The laws of almost every Euro¬ 
pean state more or less adequately secure the permanence of 
the forest; and I believe Spain is the only European land 
wdiich has not made some public provision for the protection 
and restoration of the woods—the only country whose people 
systematically war upon the garden of God.f 

* For many instances of this sort, see Beoqtjekel, Des Glimots , etc., pp. 
301-303. In 1664, the Swedes made an incursion into Jutland and felled a 
considerable extent of forest. After they retired, a survey of the damage was 
had, and the report is still extant. The number of trees cut was found to 
be 120,000, and as an account was kept of the numbers of each species of 
tree, the document is of interest in the history of the forest, as showing 
the relative proportions between the different trees which composed the 
wood. See Vaupell, Bdgens Indvandring , p. 35, and Notes , p. 55. 

t Since writing this paragraph, I have fallen upon—and that in a Span¬ 
ish author—one of those odd coincidences of thought which every man 
of miscellaneous reading so often meets with. Antonio Ponz ( Viage de 
EspaUa , i, prologo, p. lxiii), says: “ Nor would this be so great an evil, 
were not some of them declaimers against trees , thereby proclaiming them¬ 
selves, in some sort, enemies of the works of God, who gave us the leafy 
abode of Paradise to dwell in, where we should be even now sojourning, 
but for the first sin, which expelled us from it.” 

I do not know at what period the two Castiles were bared of their 
woods, but the Spaniard’s proverbial “ hatred of a tree ” is of long stand¬ 
ing. Herrera vigorously combats this foolish prejudice ; and Ponz, in the 
prologue to the ninth volume of his journey, says that many carried it so 
far as wantonly to destroy the shade and ornamental trees planted by the 
municipal authorities. “ Trees,” they contended, and still believe, “ breed 
birds, and birds eat up the grain.” Our author argues against the suppo¬ 
sition of the “ breeding of birds by trees,” which, he says, is as absurd as 
to believe that an elm tree can yield pears ; and he charitably suggests that 
the expression is, perhaps, a maniere de dire , a popular phrase, signifying 
simply that trees harbor birds. 


280 


ROYAL FORESTS. 


Royal Forests and Game Laws. 

The French authors I have quoted, as well as many other 
writers of the same nation, refer to the French Revolution as 
having given a new impulse to destructive causes which were 
already threatening the total extermination of the woods.* 
The general crusade against the forests, which accompanied 
that important event, is to be ascribed, in a considerable de¬ 
gree, to political resentments. The forest codes of the me¬ 
diaeval kings, and the local “coutumes” of feudalism contained 
many severe and even inhuman provisions, adopted rather for 
the preservation of game than from any enlightened views of 
the more important functions of the woods. Ordericus Vitalis 
informs us that William the Conqueror destroyed sixty par¬ 
ishes, and drove out their inhabitants, in order that he might 
turn their lands into a forest,f to be reserved as a hunting 
ground for himself and his posterity, and he punished with 
death the killing of a deer, wild boar, or even a hare. His 
successor, William Rufus, according to the Histoire des Rues 
de Normandie et des Rois L Angleterre, p. 67, “ was hunting 
one day in a new forest, which he had caused to be made out 
of eighteen parishes that he had destroyed, when, by mis- 

* Religious intolerance had produced similar effects in France at an 
earlier period. “ The revocation of the edict of Nantes and the dragon- 
nades occasioned the sale of the forests of the unhappy Protestants, who 
fled to seek in foreign lands the liberty of conscience which was refused 
to them in France. The forests were soon felled by the purchasers, and 
the soil in part brought under cultivation.”— Becquekel, Des Glimats , etc., 
p. 303. 

t The American reader must be reminded that, in the language of the 
chase and of the English law, a “ forest” is not necessarily a wood. Any 
large extent of ground, withdrawn from cultivation, reserved for the 
pleasures of the chase, and allowed to clothe itself with a spontaneous 
growth, serving as what is technically called “ cover ” for wild animals, 
is, in the dialects I have mentioned, a forest. When, therefore, the 
Norman kings afforested the grounds referred to in the text, it is not 
to be supposed that they planted them with trees, though the protection 
afforded to them by the game laws would, if cattle had been kept out, 
soon have converted them into real woods. 


GAME LAWS. 


281 


chance, he was killed by an arrow wherewith Tyrens de Rois 
[Sir Walter Tyrell] thought to slay a beast, but missed the 
beast, and slew the king, who was beyond it. And in this 
very same forest, his brother Richard ran so hard against a 
tree that he died of it. And men commonly said that these 
things were because they had so laid waste and taken the said 
parishes.” 

These barbarous acts, as Bonnemere observes,* were simply 
the transfer of the customs of the French kings, of their vassals, 
and even of inferior gentlemen, to conquered England. “ The 
death of a hare,” says our author, “ was a hanging matter, the 
murder of a plover a capital crime. Death was inflicted on 
those who spread nets for pigeons ; wretches who had drawn a 
bow upon a stag were to be tied to the animal alive; and 
among the seigniors it was a standing excuse for having killed 
game on forbidden ground, that they aimed at a serf.” The 
feudal lords enforced these codes with unrelenting rigor, and 
not unfrequently took the law into their own hands. In the 
time of Louis IX, according to William of Nangis, “ three 
noble children, born in Flanders, who were sojourning at the 
abbey of St. Nicholas in the Wood, to learn the speech of 
France, went out into the forest of the abbey, with their bows 
and iron-headed arrows, to disport them in shooting hares, 
chased the game, which they had started in the wood of the 
abbey, into the forest of Enguerrand, lord of Coucy, and were 
taken by the sergeants which kept the wood. When the fell 
and pitiless Sir Enguerrand knew this, he had the children 
straightway hanged without any manner of trial.” f The 

* Eistoire des Pay sans, ii, p. 190. The work of Bonnemkre is of great 
value to those who study the history of mediaeval Europe from a desire to 
know its real character, and not in the hope of finding apparent facts to 
sustain a false and dangerous theory. Bonnemere is one of the few writers 
who, like Michelet, have been honest enough and bold enough to speak 
the truth with regard to the relations between the church and the people 
in the Middle Ages. 

t It is painful to add that a similar outrage was perpetrated a very few 
years ago, in one of the European states, by a prince ol a family now de- 







282 


GAME LAWS. 


matter being brought to the notice of good King Louis, Sir 
Enguerrand was summoned to appear, and, finally, after many 
feudal shifts and dilatory pleas, brought to trial before Louis 
himself and a special council. Notwithstanding the opposition 
of the other seigniors, who, it is needless to say, spared no 
efforts to save a peer, probably not a greater criminal than 
themselves, the king was much inclined to inflict the punish¬ 
ment of death on the proud baron. “If he believed,” said he, 
“ that our Lord would be as well content with hanging as with 
pardoning, he would hang Sir Enguerrand in spite of all his 
barons; ” but noble and clerical interests unfortunately pre¬ 
vailed. The king was persuaded to inflict a milder retribu¬ 
tion, and the murderer was condemned to pay ten thousand 
livres in coin, and to “ build for the souls of the three children 
two chapels wherein mass should be said every day.” * The 
hope of shortening the purgatorial term of the young persons, 
by the religious rites to be celebrated in the chapels, was 
doubtless the consideration which operated most powerfully 
on the mind of the king ; and Europe lost a great example for 
the sake of a mass. 

The desolation and depopulation, resulting from the exten- 

throned. In this case, however, the prince hilled the trespasser with his 
own hand, his sergeants refusing to execute his mandate. 

* Guillaume de Nangis, as quoted in the notes to Joinville, N'ouvelle 
Collection des Memoires , etc., par Michaud et Poujoulat, premiere serie, i, 
p. 335. 

Persons acquainted with the character and influence of the medioeval 
clergy will hardly need to be informed that the ten thousand livres never 
found their way to the royal exchequer. It was easy to prove to the 
simple-minded king that, as the profits of sin were a monopoly of the 
church, he ought not to derive advantage from the commission of a crime 
by one of his subjects; and the priests were cunning enough both to secure 
to themselves the amount of the fine, and to extort from Louis large ad¬ 
ditional grants to carry out the purposes to which they devoted the money. 
“ And though the king did take the moneys,” says the chronicler, “ he put 
them not into his treasury, but turned them into good works; for he 
builded therewith the religious house of Pontoise, and endowed the same 
with rents and lands; also the schools and the dormitory of the friars 
preachers of Paris, and the monastery of the Minorite friars.” 


GAME LAWS. 


283 


sion of tlie forest and the enforcement of the game laws, 
iuduced several of the French kings to consent to some relaxa¬ 
tion of the severity of these latter. Francis I, however, re¬ 
vived their barbarous provisions, and, according to Bonne- 
mere, even so good a monarch as Henry IY reenacted them, 
and “ signed the sentence of death upon peasants guilty of 
having defended their fields against devastation by wild 
beasts.” “ A fine of twenty livres,” he continues, “ was im¬ 
posed on every one shooting at pigeons, which, at that time, 
swooped down by thousands upon the new-sown fields and 
devoured the seed. But let us count even this a progress, for 
we have seen that the murder of a pigeon had been a capital 
crime.” * 

Hot only were the slightest trespasses on the forest domain 
—the cutting of an oxgoad, for instance—severely punished, 
but game animals were still sacred when they had wandered 
from their native precincts and were ravaging the fields of the 
peasantry. A herd of deer or of wild boars often consumed 
or trod down a harvest of grain, the sole hope of the year for 
a whole family; and the simple driving out of such animals 
from this costly pasturage brought dire vengeance on the head 
of the rustic, who had endeavored to save his children’s bread 
from their voracity. “ At all times,” says Paul Louis Courier, 
speaking in the name of the peasants of Chambord, in the 
“ Simple Discours,” “ the game has made war upon us. Paris 
was blockaded eight hundred years by the deer, and its envi¬ 
rons, now so rich, so fertile, did not yield bread enough to 
support the gamekeepers.” f 

In the popular mind, the forest was associated with all the 

* Histone des Paysans , ii, p. 200. 

t The following details from Bonnembre will serve to give a more com¬ 
plete idea of the vexations and irritating nature of the game laws of France. 
The officers of the chase went so far as to forbid the pulling up of thistles 
and weeds, or the mowing of any unenclosed ground before St. John’s day 
[24th June], in order that the nests of game birds might not be disturbed. 
It was unlawful to fence-in any grounds in the plains where royal resi¬ 
dences were situated; thorns were ordered to be planted in all fields of 




284 


EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 


abuses of feudalism, and the evils the peasantry bad suffered 
from the legislation which protected both it and the game it 
sheltered, blinded them to the still greater physical mischiefs 
which its destruction was to entail upon them. No longer 
protected by law-, the crown forests and those of the great 
lords were attacked with relentless fury, unscrupulously plun¬ 
dered and wantonly laid waste, and even the rights of prop¬ 
erty in small private woods were no longer respected.* 
Various absurd theories, some of which are not even yet 
exploded, were propagated with regard to the economical 
advantages of converting the forest into pasture and plough- 

wheat, barley, or oats, to prevent the use of ground nets for catching the 
birds which consumed, or were believed to consume, the grain, and it was 
forbidden to cut or pull stubble before the first of October, lest the part¬ 
ridge and the quail might be deprived of their cover. For destroying the 
eggs of the quail, a fine of one hundred livres was imposed for the first 
offence, double that amount for the second, and for the third the culprit 
was flogged and banished for five years to a distance of six leagues from 
the forest .—Histoire des Paysans , ii, p. 202, text and notes. 

Neither these severe penalties, nor any provisions devised by the inge¬ 
nuity of modern legislation, have been able effectually to repress poaching. 
“ The game laws,” says Clave, “have not delivered us from the poachers, 
who kill twenty times as much game as the sportsmen. In the forest of 
Fontainebleau, as in all those belonging to the state, poaching is a very 
common and a very profitable offence. It is in vain that the gamekeepers 
are on the alert night and day, they cannot prevent it. Those who follow 
the trade begin by carefully studying the habits of the game. They will 
lie motionless on the ground, by the roadside or in thickets, for whole 
days, watching the paths most frequented by the animals,” &c.— Revue des 
Deux Mondes , Mai, 1863, p. 160. 

The writer adds many details on this subject, and it appears that, as 
there are “ beggars on horseback ” in South America, there are poachers 
in carriages in France. 

* “ Whole trees were sacrificed for the most insignificant purposes; the 
peasants would cut down two firs to make a single pair of wooden shoes.” 
—Michelet, as quoted by Clave, fitudes, p. 24. 

A similar wastefulness formerly prevailed in Russia, though not from 
the same cause. In St. Pierre’s time, the planks brought to St. Petersburg 
were not sawn, but hewn with the axe, and a tree furnished but a single 
plank. 


SMALLER FOREST PLANTS. 


285 


land, its injurious effects upon climate, health, facility of 
internal communication, and the like. Thus resentful memory 
of the wrongs associated with the forest, popular ignorance, 
and the cupidity of speculators cunning enough to turn these 
circumstances to profitable account, combined to hasten the 
sacrifice of the remaining woods, and a waste was produced 
which hundreds of years and millions of treasure will hardly 
repair. 

Small Forest Plants , and Yitality of Seed. 

Another function of the woods to which I have barely 
alluded deserves a fuller notice than can be bestowed upon it 
in a treatise the scope of which is purely economical. The 
forest is the native habitat of a large number of humbler 
plants, to the growth and perpetuation of which its shade, its 
humidity, and its vegetable mould appear to be indispensable 
necessities.* We cannot positively say that the felling of the 

* “ A hundred and fifty paces from my house is a hill of drift sand, on 
which stood a few scattered pines. Pinus sylvestris , and Sempervivum tec- 
torum in abundance, Statice armeria , Ammone vernalis , Dianthus carthusi- 
anorum , with other sand plants, were growing there. I planted the hill 
with a few birches, and all the plants I have mentioned completely disap¬ 
peared, though there were many naked spots of sand between the trees. 
It should be added, however, that the hillock is more thickly wooded than 
before. * * * It seems then that Sempervivum tectorum , &c., will not 

bear the neighborhood of the birch, though growing well near the Pinus 
sylvestris. I have found the large red variety of Agaricus deliciosus only 
among the roots of the pine; the greenish-blue Agaricus deliciosus among 
alder roots, but not near any other tree. Birds have their partialities 
among trees and shrubs. The Silvia} prefer the Pinus Larix to other trees. 
In my garden this Pinus is never without them, but I never saw a bird 
perch on Thuja occidentalis or Juniperus sabina , although the thick foliage 
of these latter trees affords birds a better shelter than the loose leafage of 
other trees. Not even a wren ever finds its way to one of them. Perhaps 
the scent of the Thuja and the Juniperus is offensive to them. I have 
spoiled one of my meadows by cutting away the bushes. It formerly bore 
grass four feet high, because many umbelliferous plants, such as Heracleum 
spondylium , Spiraea ulmaria , Laserpitium latifolia , &c., grew in it. Under 
the shelter of the bushes these plants ripened and bore seed, but they grad¬ 
ually disappeared as the shrubs were extirpated, and the grass now does 


286 


SMALLER FOREST PLANTS. 


woods in a given vegetable province would involve the final 
extinction of the smaller plants which are found only within 
their precincts. Some of these, though not naturally propa¬ 
gating themselves in the open ground, may perhaps germinate 
and grow under artificial stimulation and protection, and 
finally become hardy enough to maintain an independent 
existence in very different circumstances from those which at 
present seem essential to their life. 

not grow to the height of more than two feet, because it is no longer 
obliged to keep pace with the umbellifera which flourished among it.” See 
a paper by J. G-. Buttner, of Kurland, in Beeghatjs’ Geographisches Jahr- 
buch, 1852, No. 4, pp. 14, 15. 

These facts are interesting as illustrating the multitude of often obscure 
conditions upon which the life or vigorous growth of smaller organisms 
depends. Particular species of truffles and of mushrooms are found asso¬ 
ciated with particular trees, without being, as is popularly supposed, para¬ 
sites deriving their nutriment from the dying or dead roots of those trees. 
The success of Rousseau’s experiments seem decisive on this point, for he 
obtains larger crops of truffles from ground covered with young seedling 
oaks than from that filled with roots of old trees. See an article on Mont 
Yentoux, by Charles Martins, in the Revue des Deux Mondes , Avril, 1868, 

p. 626. 

It ought to be much more generally known than it is that most, if not 
all mushrooms, even of the species reputed poisonous, may be rendered 
harmless and healthful as food by soaking them for two hours in acidulated 
or salt water. The water requires two or three spoonfuls of vinegar or 
two spoonfuls of gray salt to the quart, and a quart of -water is enough for 
a pound of sliced mushrooms. After thus soaking, they are well washed 
in fresh water, thrown into cold water, which is raised to the boiling point, 
and, after remaining half an hour, taken out and again washed. Gerard, 
to prove that “ crumpets is wholesome,” ate one hundred and seventy-five 
pounds of the most poisonous mushrooms thus prepared, in a single month, 
fed his family ad libitum with the same, and finally administered them, in 
heroic doses, to the members of a committee appointed by the Council of 
Health of the city of Paris. See Figuier, VAnnee Scientifique , 1862, pp. 
853, 384. 

It has long been known that the Russian peasantry eat, with impunity, 
mushrooms of species everywhere else regarded as very poisonous. Is it 
not probable that the secret of rendering them harmless—which was 
known to Pliny, though since forgotten in Italy—is possessed by the 
rustic Muscovites ? 


VITALITY OF SEEDS. 


287 


Besides this, although the accounts of the growth of seeds, 
which have lain for ages in the ashy dryness of Egyptian cata¬ 
combs, are to be received with great caution, or, more proba¬ 
bly, to be rejected altogether, yet their vitality seems almost 
imperishable while they remain in the situations in which 
nature deposits them. When a forest old enough to have 
witnessed the mysteries of the Druids is felled, trees of other 
species spring up in its place; and when they, in their turn, 
fall before the axe, sometimes even as soon as they have 
spread their protecting shade over the surface, the germs 
which their predecessors had shed years, perhaps centuries 
before, sprout up, and in due time, if not choked by other 
trees belonging to a later stage in the order of natural succes¬ 
sion, restore again the original wood. In these cases, the 
seeds of the new crop may often have been brought by the 
wind, by birds, by quadrupeds, or by other causes; but, in 
many instances, this explanation is not probable. 

When newly cleared ground is burnt over in the United 
States, the ashes are hardly cold before they are covered with 
a crop of fire weed, a tall herbaceous plant, very seldom seen 
growing under other circumstances, and often not to be found 
for a distance of many miles from the clearing. Its seeds, 
whether the fruit of an ancient vegetation, or newly sown by 
winds or birds require either a quickening by a heat which 
raises to a certain high point the temperature of the stratum 
where they lie buried, or a special pabulum furnished only by 
the combustion of the vegetable remains that cover the ground 
in the woods. Earth brought up from wells or other excava¬ 
tions soon produces a harvest of plants often very unlike those 
of the local flora. 

Moritz Wagner, as quoted by Wittwer,* remarks in his 
description of Mount Ararat: “ A singular phenomenon to 
which my guide drew my attention is the appearance of sev¬ 
eral plants on the earth-heaps left by the last catastrophe [an 
earthquake], which grow nowhere else on the mountain, and 


* PhysiJcalische Geographic , p. 486. 


288 


VITALITY OF SEEDS. 


had never been observed in this region before. The seeds of 
these plants were probably brought by birds, and found in the 
loose, clayey soil remaining from the streams of mud, the con¬ 
ditions of growth which the other soil of the mountain refused 
them.” This is probable enough, but it is hardly less so that 
the flowing mud brought them up to the influence of air and 
sun, from depths where a previous convulsion had buried them 
ages before. Seeds of small sylvan plants, too deeply buried 
by successive layers of forest foliage and the mould resulting 
from its decomposition to be reached by the plough when the 
trees are gone and the ground brought under cultivation, may, 
if a wiser posterity replants the wood which sheltered their 
parent stems, germinate and grow, after lying for generations 
in a state of suspended animation. 

Darwin says : “ In Staffordshire, on the estate of a relation, 
where I had ample means of investigation, there was a large 
and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by 
the hand of man, but several hundred acres of exactly the 
same nature had been enclosed twenty-five years previously 
and planted with Scotch fir. The change in the native vege¬ 
tation of the planted part of the heath was most remarkable— 
more than is generally seen in passing from one quite different 
soil to another; not only the proportional numbers of the 
heath plants were wholly changed, but twelve species of plants 
(not counting grasses and sedges) flourished in the plantation 
which could not be found on the heath.” * Had the author 
informed us that these twelve plants belong to a species whose 
seeds enter into the nutriment of the birds which appeared 
with the young wood, we could easily account for their pres¬ 
ence in the soil; but he says distinctly that the birds were of 
insectivorous species, and it therefore seems more probable 
that the seeds had been dej>osited when an ancient forest pro¬ 
tected the growth of the plants which bore them, and that 
they sprang up to new life when a return of favorable con¬ 
ditions awaked them from a sleep of centuries. Darwin 


* Origin of Species, American edition, p. 69. 


VITALITY OF SEEDS. 


289 


indeed says that the heath “ had never been touched by the 
hand of man.” Perhaps not, after it became a heath ; but 
what evidence is there to control the general presumption 
that this heath was preceded by a forest, in whose shade the 
vegetables which dropped the seeds in question might have 
grown ? * 

Although, therefore, the destruction of a wood and the 
reclaiming of the soil to agricultural uses suppose the death 
of its smaller dependent flora, these revolutions do not exclude 
the possibility of its resurrection. In a practical view of the 
subject, however, we must admit that when the woodman fells 
a tree he sacrifices the colony of humbler growths which had 

* "Writers on vegetable physiology record numerous instances where 
seeds have grown after lying dormant for ages. The following cases, men¬ 
tioned by Dr. Dwight (Travels, ii, pp. 438, 439), may be new to many 
readers: 

“ The lands [in Panton, Vermont], which have here been once culti¬ 
vated, and again permitted to lie waste for several years, yield a rich and 
fine growth of hickory '(Carya porcino]. Of this wood there is not, I be¬ 
lieve, a single tree in any original forest within fifty miles from this spot. 
The native growth was here white pine, of which I did see a single stem 
in a whole grove of hickory.” 

The hickory is a walnut, bearing a fruit too heavy to be likely to be 
carried fifty miles by birds, and besides, I believe it is not eaten by any 
bird indigenous to Vermont. 

“ A field, about five miles from Northampton, on an eminence called 
Rail Hill, was cultivated about a century ago. The native growth here, 
and in all the surrounding region, was wholly oak, chestnut, &c. As the 
field belonged to my grandfather, I had the best opportunity of learning 
its history. It contained about five acres, in the form of an irregular 
parallelogram. As the savages rendered the cultivation dangerous, it was 
given up. On this ground there sprang up a grove of white pines cover¬ 
ing the field and retaining its figure exactly. So far as I remember, there 
was not in it a single oak or chestnut tree. * * * There was not a sin¬ 
gle pine whose seeds were, or, probably, had for ages been, sufficiently 
near to have been planted on this spot. The fact that these white pines 
covered this field exactly, so as to preserve both its extent and its figure, 
and that there were none in the neighborhood, are decisive proofs that cul¬ 
tivation brought up the seeds of a former forest within the limits of vege¬ 
tation, and gave them an opportunity to germinate.” 

19 


290 


SMALL FOREST PLANTS. 


vegetated under its protection. Some wood plants are known 
to possess valuable medicinal properties, and experiment may 
show that the number of these is greater than we now suppose. 
Few of them, however, have any other economical value than 
that of furnishing a slender pasturage to cattle allowed to 
roam in the woods; and even this small advantage is far 
more than compensated by the mischief done to the young 
trees by browsing animals. Upon the whole, the importance 
of this class of vegetables, as physic or as food, is not such as 
to furnish a very telling popular argument for the conservation 
of the forest as a necessary means of their perpetuation. More 
potent remedial agents may supply their place in the 7nateria 
medica , and an acre of grass land yields more nutriment for 
cattle than a range of a hundred acres of forest. But he 
whose sympathies with nature have taught him to feel that 
there is a fellowship between all God’s creatures; to love the 
brilliant ore better than the dull ingot, iodic silver and crys¬ 
tallized red copper better than the shillings and the pennies 
forged from them by the coiner’s cunning; a venerable oak 
tree than the brandy cask whose staves are split out from its 
heart wood ; a bed of anemones, hepaticas, or wood violets 
than the leeks and onions which he may grow on the soil they 
have enriched and in the air they made fragrant—he who has 
enjoyed that special training of the heart and intellect which 
can be acquired only in the unviolated sanctuaries of nature, 
“ where man is distant, but God is near ”—will not rashly 
assert his right to extirpate a tribe of harmless vegetables, 
barely because their products neither tickle his palate nor fill 
his pocket; and his regret at the dwindling area of the forest 
solitude will be augmented by the reflection that the nurse¬ 
lings of the woodland perish with the pines, the oaks, and the 
beeches that sheltered them.* 

* Quaint old Valvasor had observed the subduing influence of nature’s 
solitudes. In describing the lonely Canker-Thal, which, though rocky, 
was in his time well wooded with “ fir, larches, beeches, and other trees,” 
he says: “ Gladsomeness and beauty, which dwell in many valleys, may 
not be looked for there. The journey through it is cheerless, melancholy, 


THE LOCUST. 


291 


Although, as I have said, birds do not frequent the deeper 
recesses of the wood,* jet a very large proportion of them 
build their nests in trees, and find in their foliage and 
branches a secure retreat from the inclemencies of the seasons 
and the pursuit of the reptiles and quadrupeds which prey 
upon them. The borders of the forests are vocal with song; 
and when the gray morning calls the creeping things of the 
earth out of their night cells, it summons from the neighboring 
wood legions of their winged enemies, which swoop down 
upon the fields to save man’s harvests by devouring the de¬ 
stroying worm, and surprising the lagging beetle in his tardy 
retreat to the dark cover where he lurks through the hours of 
daylight. 

The insects most injurious to rural industry do not multi¬ 
ply in or near the woods. The locust, which ravages the East 
with its voracious armies, is bred in vast open plains which 
admit the full heat of the sun to hasten the hatching of the 
eggs, gather no moisture to destroy them, and harbor no bird 
to feed upon the larvse.f It is only since the felling of the 
forests of Asia Minor and Gyrene that the locust has become 
so fearfully destructive in those countries; and the grasshop¬ 
per, which now threatens to be almost as great a pest to the 
agriculture of some North American soils, breeds in seriously 

wearisome, and serveth to temper and mortify over-joyousness of thought. 
* * * In sum it is a very wild, wherein the wildness of human pride 

doth grow tame .”—Elire der Crain , i, p. 136, b. 

* Valvasor says, in the same paragraph from which I have just quoted, 
“ In my many journeys through this valley, I did never have sight of so 
much as a single bird.” 

f Smela, in the government of Kiew, has, for some years, not suffered 
at all from the locusts, which formerly came every year in vast swarms, 
and the curculio, so injurious to the turnip crops, is less destructive there 
than in other parts of the province. This improvement is owing partly to 
the more thorough cultivation of the soil, partly to the groves which are 
interspersed among the plough lands. * * * When in the midst of the 

plains woods shall be planted and filled with insectivorous birds, the locusts 
will cease to be a plague and a terror to the farmer.— Rentzsoh, Der Wald, 
pp. 45, 46. 



292 


FORESTS OF EUROPE. 


injurious numbers only where a wide extent of surface is bare 
of woods. 

Utility of the Forest. 

In most parts of Europe, the woods are already so nearly 
extirpated that the mere protection of those which now exist 
is by no means an adequate remedy for the evils resulting 
from the want of them; and besides, as I have already said, 
abundant experience has shown that no legislation can secure 
the permanence of the forest in private hands. Enlightened 
individuals in most European states, governments in others, 
have made very extensive plantations,* and France has now 
set herself energetically at work to restore the woods in the 
southern provinces, and thereby to prevent the utter depopu¬ 
lation and waste with which that once fertile soil and delicious 
climate are threatened. 

The objects of the restoration of the forest are as multifari¬ 
ous as the motives that have led to its destruction, and as the 
evils which that destruction has occasioned. It is hoped that 
the planting of the mountains will diminish the frequency and 
violence of river inundations, prevent the formation of tor¬ 
rents, mitigate the extremes of atmospheric temperature, 
humidity, and precipitation, restore dried-up springs, rivulets, 
and sources of irrigation, shelter the fields from chilling and 
from parching winds, prevent the spread of miasmatic efiluvia, 

* England is, I believe, the only country where private enterprise has 
pursued sylviculture on a really great scale, though admirable examples 
have been set in many others on both sides of the Atlantic. In England 
the law of primogeniture, and other institutions and national customs 
which tend to keep large estates long undivided and in the same line of 
inheritance, the wealth of the landholders, and the difficulty of finding safe 
and profitable investments of capital, combine to afford encouragements 
for the plantation of forests, which nowhere else exist in the same degree. 
The climate of England, too, is very favorable to the growth of forest trees, 
though the character of surface secures a large part of the island from the 
evils which have resulted from the destruction of the woods elsewhere, 
and therefore their restoration is a matter of less geographical importance 
in England than on the Continent. 


DEMAND FOK WOOD. 


293 


and, finally, furnish an inexhaustible and self-renewing supply 
of a material indispensable to so many purposes of domestic 
comfort, to the successful exercise of every art of peace, every 
destructive energy of war.* 

But our enumeration of the uses of trees is not yet com¬ 
plete. Besides the influence of the forest, in mountain ranges, 
as a means of preventing the scooping out of ravines and the 
accumulations of water which fill them, trees subserve a valu¬ 
able purpose, in lower positions, as barriers against the spread 
of floods and of the material they transport with them; but 
this will be more appropriately considered in the chapter on 
the waters; and another very important use of trees, that of 
fixing movable sand-dunes, and reclaiming them to profitable 
cultivation, will be pointed out in the chapter on the sands. 

The vast extension of railroads, of manufactures, and the 
mechanical arts, of military armaments, and especially of the 
commercial fleets and navies of Christendom within the pres¬ 
ent century, has greatly augmented the demand for wood,f 

* The preservation of the woods on the eastern frontier of France, as 
a kind of natural abattis, is also recognized by the Government of that 
country as an important measure of military defence, though there have 
been conflicting opinions on the subject. 

f Let us take the supply of timber for railroad ties. According to 
Clave (p. 248), France has 9,000 kilometres of railway in operation, 7,000 
in construction, half of which is built with a double track. Adding turn¬ 
outs and extra tracks at stations, the number of ties required for a single 
track is stated at 1,200 to the kilometre, or, as Clavd computes, for the 
entire network of France, 58,000,000. As the schoolboys say, “ this sum 
does not prove; ” for 16,000 4- 8,000 for the double track halfway = 
24,000, and 24,000 X 1,200 = 28,800,000. According to Bigelow (Les Etats 
Unis en 1863, p. 439), the United States had in operation or construction 
on the first of January, 1862, 51,000 miles, or about 81,000 kilometres of 
railroad, and the military operations of the present civil war are rapidly 
extending the system. Allowing the same proportion as in France, the 
American railroads required 97,200,000 ties in 1862. The consumption of 
timber in Europe and America during the present generation, occasioned 
by this demand, has required the sacrifice of many hundred thousand acres 
of forest, and if we add the quantity employed for telegraph posts, we have 
an amount of destruction, for entirely new purposes, which is really appalling. 

The consumption of wood lor luciler matches is enormous, and I have 


294 


DEMAND FOR WOOD. 


and, but for improvements in metallurgy which have facili¬ 
tated the substitution of iron for that material, the last twenty- 
five years would almost have stripped Europe of her only 

heard of several instances where tracts of fine forest, hundreds and even 
thousands of acres in extent, have been purchased and felled, solely to 
supply timber for this purpose. 

The demand for wood for small carvings and for children’s toys is in¬ 
credibly large. Rentzsch states the export of such objects from the town 
of Sonneberg alone to have amounted, in 1853, to 60,000 centner, or three 
thousand tons’ weight .—Dcr Wald , p. 68. 

The importance of so managing the forest that it may continue indefi¬ 
nitely to furnish an adequate supply of material for naval architecture is 
well illustrated by some remarks of the same author in the valuable little 
work just cited. He suggests that the prosperity of modern England is 
due, in no small degree, to the supplies of wood and other material for 
building and equipping ships, received from the forests of her colonies and 
of other countries with which she has maintained close commercial rela¬ 
tions, and he adds: “ Spain, which by her position seemed destined for 
universal power, and once, in fact, possessed it, has lost her political rank, 
because during the unwise administration of the successors of Philip II, 
the empty exchequer could not furnish the means of building new fleets; 
for the destruction of the forests had raised the price of timber above the 
resources of the state .”—Der Wald , p. 63. 

The market price of timber, like that of all other commodities, may be 
said, in a general way, to be regulated by the laws of demand and supply, 
but it is also controlled by those seemingly unrelated accidents which so 
often disappoint the calculations of political economists in other branches 
of commerce. A curious case of this sort is noticed by Cerini, DelV 
Impianto e Conservazione dei Boschi , p. 17: “In the mountains on the 
Lago Maggiore, in years when maize is cheap, the woodcutters can pro¬ 
vide themselves with corn meal enough for a week by three days’ labor, 
and they refuse to work the remaining four. Hence the dealers in wood, 
not being able to supply the demand, for want of laborers, are obliged to 
raise the price for the following season, both for timber and for firewood; 
so that a low price of grain occasions a high price of building lumber and 
of fuel. The consequence is, that though the poor have supplied them¬ 
selves cheaply with food, they must pay dear for firewood, and they can¬ 
not get work, because the high price of lumber has discouraged repairs 
and building, the expense of which landed proprietors cannot undertake 
when their incomes have been reduced by sales of grain at low rates, and 
hence there is not demand enough for lumber to induce the timber mer¬ 
chants to furnish employment to the woodmen.” 


DEMAND FOR WOOD. 


295 


remaining trees fit for such uses.* The walnut trees alone 
felled in Europe within two years to furnish the armies of 

* Besides the substitution of iron for wood, a great saving of consump¬ 
tion of this latter material has been effected by the revival of ancient 
methods of increasing its durability, and the invention of new processes 
for the same purpose. The most effectual preservative yet discovered for 
wood employed on land, is sulphate of copper, a solution of which is 
introduced into the pores of the wood while green, by soaking, by forcing- 
pumps, or, most economically, by the simple pressure of a column of the 
fluid in a small pipe connected with the end of the piece of timber sub¬ 
jected to the treatment. Clave (Etudes Forestieres , pp. 240-249) gives an 
interesting account of the various processes employed for rendering wood 
imperishable, and states that railroad ties injected with sulphate of copper 
in 1846, were found absolutely unaltered in 1855 ; and telegraphic posts 
prepared two years earlier, are now in a state of perfect preservation. 

For many purposes, the method of injection is too expensive, and some 
simpler process is much to be desired. The question of the proper time 
of felling timber is not settled, and the best modes of air, water, and steam 
seasoning are not yet fully ascertained. Experiments on these subjects 
would be well worth the patronage of governments in new countries, 
where they can be very easily made, without the necessity of much waste 
of valuable material, and without expensive arrangements for observation. 

The practice of stripping living trees of their bark some years before 
they are felled, is as old as the time of Vitruvius, but is much less followed 
than it deserves, partly because the timber of trees so treated inclines to 
crack and split, and partly because it becomes so hard as to be wrought 
with considerable difficulty. 

In America, economy in the consumption of fuel has been much pro¬ 
moted by the substitution of coal for wood, the general use of stoves both 
for wood and coal, and recently by the employment of anthracite in the 
furnaces of stationary and locomotive steam-engines. All the objections 
to the use of anthracite for this latter purpose appear to have been over¬ 
come, and the improvements in its combustion have been attended with 
a great pecuniary saving, and with much advantage to the preservation of 
the woods. 

The employment of coal has produced a great reduction in the con¬ 
sumption of fire wood in Paris. In 1815, the supply of fire wood for the 
city required 1,200,000 steres, or cubic metres; in 1859, it had fallen to 
501,805, while, in the mean time, the consumption of coal had risen from 
600,000 to 432,000,000 metrical quintals. See Clave, Etudes , p. 212. 

I think there must be some error in this last sum, as 432 millions 
of metrical quintals would amount to 43 millions of tons, a quantity which 



296 


FORESTS OF FRANCE. 


America with gunstocks, would form a forest ol no incon¬ 
siderable extent.* 


The Forests of Europe. 

Mirabeau estimated the forests of France in 1750 at seven¬ 
teen millions of hectares [42,000,000 acres] ; in 1860 they 
were reduced to eight millions [19,769,000 acres]. This 
would he at the rate of 82,000 hectares [202,600 acres] per 
year. Troy, from whose valuable pamphlet, Etude sur le 
Jdeboisement des Montagues , I take these statistical details, 
supposes that Mirabeau’s statement may have been an extrav¬ 
agant one, but it still remains certain that the w T aste has been 
enormous; for it is known that, in some departments, that of 
Ari&ge, for instance, clearing has gone on during the last half 
century at the rate of three thousand acres a year,f and in all 
parts of the empire trees have been felled faster than they 
have grown. The total area of France, excluding Savoy, is 
about one hundred and thirty-one millions of acres. The 
extent of forest supposed by Mirabeau would be about thirty- 
two per cent, of the whole territory.]; In a country and a 
climate where the conservative influences of the forest are so 
necessary as in France, trees must cover a large surface and be 

it is difficult to suppose could be consumed in tlie city of Paris. The price 
of fire wood has scarcely advanced at all in Paris for half a century, though 
that of timber generally has risen enormously. 

* In the first two years of the present civil war in the United States, 
twenty-eight thousand walnut trees were felled to supply a single European 
manufactory of gun stocks for the American market. 

t Among the indirect proofs of the comparatively recent existence of 
extensive forests in France, may be mentioned the fact, that wolves were 
abundant, not very long since, in parts of the empire where there are now 
neither wolves nor woods to shelter them. Arthur Young more than once 
speaks of the “ innumerable multitudes ” of these animals which infested 
France in 1789, and George Sand states, in the Histoire de ma Vie , that 
some years after the restoration of the Bourbons, they chased travellers 
on horseback in the Southern provinces, and literally knocked at the doors 
of her father-in-law’s country seat. 

J In the Eecepte Veritable , Palissy having expressed his indignation at 
the folly of men in destroying the woods, his interlocutor defends the 


FORESTS OF FRANCE. 297 

grouped in large masses, in order to discharge to the best ad¬ 
vantage the various functions assigned to them by nature. 
The consumption of wood is rapidly increasing in that empire, 
and a large part of its territory is mountainous, sterile, and 
otherwise such in character or situation that it can be more 
profitably devoted to the growth of wood than to any agricul¬ 
tural use. Hence it is evident that the proportion of forest 
in 1750, taking even Mirabeau’s large estimate, was not very 
much too great for permanent maintenance, though doubtless 
the distribution was so unequal that it would have been sound 
policy to fell the woods and clear land in some provinces, 
while large forests should have been planted in others.* Du- 

policy of felling them, by citing the example of “ divers bishops, cardinals, 
priors, abbots, monkeries, and chapters, which, by cutting their woods, 
have made three profits,” the sale of the timber, the rent of the ground, 
and the “ good portion ” they received of the grain grown by the peasants 
upon it. To this argmnent, Palissy replies : “ I cannot enough detest this 
thing, and I call it not an error, but a curse and a calamity to all France ; 
for when forests shall be cut, all arts shall cease, and they which practise 
them shall be driven out to eat grass with Nebuchadnezzar and the beasts 
of the field. I have divers times thought to set down in writing the arts 
which shall perish when there shall be no more wood; but when I had 
written down a great number, I did perceive that there could be no end 
of my writing, and having diligently considered, I found there was not 
any which could be followed without wood.” * * “And truly I could 

well allege to thee a thousand reasons, but ’tis so cheap a philosophy, that 
the very chamber wenches, if they do but think, may see that without 
wood, it is not possible to exercise any manner of human art or cunning.” 
— CEuvres de Bernard Palissy, p. 89. 

* Since writing the above paragraph, I have found the view I have 
taken of this point confirmed by the careful investigations of Rentzsch, 
who estimates the proper proportion of woodland to entire surface at 
twenty-three per cent, for the interior of Germany, and supposes that near 
the coast, where the air is supplied with humidity by evaporation from 
the sea, it might safely be reduced to twenty per cent. See RentzsclPs 
very valuable prize essay, Dev Wald im EausJialt der JSFatur und der 
VoUcswirthschaft , cap. viii. 

The due proportion in France would considerably exceed that for the 
German States, because France has relatively more surface unfit for any 
growth but that of wood, because the form and geological character of her 


298 


FORESTS OF RUSSIA. 


ring the period in question, France neither exported manufac¬ 
tured wood or rough timber, nor derived important collateral 
advantages of any sort from the destruction of her forests. 
She is consequently impoverished and crippled to the extent 
of the difference between what she actually possesses of 
wooded surface and what she ought to have retained. 

Italy and Spain are bared of trees in a greater degree than 
France, and even Russia, which we habitually consider as sub¬ 
stantially a forest country, is beginning to suffer seriously for 
want of wood. Jourdier, as quoted by Clave, observes : “ In¬ 
stead of a vast territory with immense forests, which we expect 
to meet, one sees only scattered groves thinned by the wind or 
by the axe of the moujik , grounds cut over and more or less 
recently cleared for cultivation. There is probably not a single 
district in Russia which has not to deplore the ravages of man 
or of fire, those two great enemies of Muscovite sylviculture. 
This is so true, that clear-sighted men already foresee a crisis 
which will become terrible, unless the discovery of great de¬ 
posits of some new combustible, as pit coal or anthracite, shall 
diminish its evils.” * 

mountains expose her territory to much greater injury from torrents, and 
because at least her southern provinces are more frequently visited both 
by extreme drought and by deluging rains. 

* fitudes sur VEconomie Forestiere , p. 261. Clave adds (p. 262): “ The 
Eussian forests are very unequally distributed through the territory of this 
vast empire. In the north they form immense masses, and cover whole 
provinces, while in the south they are so completely wanting that 
the inhabitants have no other fuel than straw, dung, rushes, and heath.” 
* * * “At Moscow, firewood costs thirty per cent, more than at 
Paris, while, at the distance of a few leagues, it sells for a tenth of that 
price.” 

This state of things is partly due to the want of facilities of transporta¬ 
tion, and some parts of the United States are in a similar condition. 
During a severe winter, six or seven years ago, the sudden freezing of the 
canals and rivers, before a large American town had received its usual 
supply of fuel, occasioned an enormous rise in the price of wood and coal, 
and the poor suffered severely for want of it. Within a few hours of the 
city were large forests and an abundant stock of firewood felled and pre¬ 
pared for burning. This might easily have been carried to town by the 


FORESTS OF GERMANY. 


299 


Germany, from character of surface and climate, and from 
the attention which has long been paid in all the German 
States to sylviculture, is, taken as a whole, in a far better con¬ 
dition in this respect than its more southern neighbors; but in 
the Alpine provinces of Bavaria and Austria, the same improvi¬ 
dence which marks the rural economy of the corresponding dis¬ 
tricts of Switzerland, Italy, and France, is producing effects 
hardly less disastrous. As an instance of the scarcity of fuel in 
some parts of the territory of Bavaria, where, not long since, 
wood abounded, I may mention the fact that the water of salt 
springs is, in some instances, conveyed to the distance of sixty 


railroads which passed through the woods; hut the managers of the roads 
refused to receive it as freight, because the opening of a new market 
for wood might raise the price of the fuel they employed for their loco¬ 
motives. 

Hohenstein, who Was long professionally employed as a forester in Rus¬ 
sia, describes the consequences of the general war upon the woods in that 
country as already most disastrous, and as threatening still more ruinous 
evils. The river Volga, the life artery of Russian internal commerce, is 
drying up from this cause, and the great Muscovite plains are fast ad¬ 
vancing to a desolation like that of Persia .—Der Wald , p. 223. 

The level of the Caspian Sea is eighty-three feet lower than that of the 
Sea of Azoff, and the surface of Lake Aral is fast sinking. Von Baer 
maintains that the depression of the Caspian was produced by a sudden 
subsidence, from geological causes, and not gradually by excess of evapo¬ 
ration over supply. See Kaspische Studien , p. 25. But this subsidence 
diminished the area, and consequently the evaporation of that sea, and the 
rivers which once maintained its ancient equilibrium ought to raise it to 
its former level, if their own flow had not been diminished. It is, indeed, 
not proved that the laying bare of a wooded country diminishes the total 
annual precipitation upon it; but it is certain that the summer evaporation 
from the surface of a champaign region, like that through which the 
Volga, its tributaries, and the feeders of Lake Aral flow, is increased by 
the removal of its woods. Hence, though as much rain may still fall in 
the valleys of those rivers as when their whole surface was covered with 
forests, a less quantity of water may be delivered by them since their 
basins were cleared, and therefore the present condition of the inland 
waters in question may be due to the removal of the forests in their 
basins. 


300 


AMERICAN FORESTS. 


miles, in iron pipes, to reach a supply of fuel for boiling it 
down.* 


Forests of the United States and Canada. 

The vast forests of the United States and Canada cannot 
long resist the improvident habits of the backwoodsman and 
the increased demand for lumber. According to the census 
of the former country for 1860, which gives returns of the 


* Rentzsch {Der Wald , etc., pp. 123, 124) states the proportions of 
woodland in different European countries as follows: 



Per cent. 

Acres per 
head of pop¬ 
ulation. 


Per cent. 

Acres per 
head of popu¬ 
lation. 

Germany. 

26.58 

0.6638 

Switzerland. 

15. 

0.396 

Great Britain. 

5. 

0.1 

Holland. 

7.10 

0.12 

France. 

16.79 

0.3766 

Belgium. 

18.52 

0.186 

Russia. 

30.90 

4.28 

Spain. 

5.52 

0.291 

Sweden. 

60. 

8.55 

Portugal. 

4.40 

0.182 

Norway. 

66. 

24.61 

Sardinia. 

12.29 

0.223 

Denmark. 

5.50 

0.22 

Naples. 

9.43 

0.138 


Probably no European countries can so well dispense with the forests, 
in their capacity of conservative influences, as England and Ireland. Their 
insular position and latitude secure an abundance of atmospheric moisture, 
and the general inclination of surface is not such as to expose it to special 
injury from torrents. The due proportion of woodland in England and 
Ireland is, therefore, almost purely an economical question, to be decided 
by the comparative direct pecuniary return from forest growth, pasturage, 
and plough land. 

In Scotland, where the country is for the most part more broken and 
mountainous, the general destruction of the forests has been attended with 
very serious evils, and it is in Scotland that many of the most extensive 
British forest plantations have now been formed. But although the incli¬ 
nation of surface in Scotland is rapid, the geological constitution of the soil 
is not of a character to promote such destructive degradation by running 
water as in Southern France, and it has not to contend with the parching 
droughts by which the devastations of the torrents are rendered more in¬ 
jurious in that part of the French empire. 

In giving the proportion of woodland to population, I compute 
Rentzsch’s Morgen at .3882 of an English acre, because I find, by Alexan¬ 
der’s most accurate and valuable Dictionary of Weights and Measures, 
that this is the value of the Dresden Morgen, and Rentzsch is a Saxon 
writer. In the different German States, there are more than twenty dif- 































AMERICAN FORESTS. 


301 


“ sawed and planed lumber” alone, timber for framing and 
for a vast variety of mechanical purposes being omitted alto¬ 
gether, the value of the former material prepared for market 
in the United States was, in 1850, $58,521,976 ; in 1860, 
$95,912,286. The quantity of unsawed lumber is not likely to 
have increased in the same proportion, because comparatively 
little is exported in that condition, and because masonry is fast 
taking the place of carpentry in building, and stone, brick, 
and iron are used instead of timber more largely than they 
were ten years ago. Still a much greater quantity of unsawed 
lumber must have been marketed in 1860 than in 1850. It 
must further be admitted that the price of lumber rose consid¬ 
erably between those dates, and consequently that the increase 
in quantity is not to be measured by the increase in pecuniary 
value. Perhaps this rise of prices may even be sufficient to 
make the entire difference between the value of “ sawed and 
planed lumber ” produced in the ten years in question by the 
six New England States (21 per cent.), and the six Middle 
States (15 per cent.) ; but the amount produced by the West¬ 
ern and by the Southern States had doubled, and that returned 
from the Pacific States and Territories had trebled in value in 
the same interval, so that there was certainly, in those States, a 
large increase in the actual quantity prepared for sale. 

I greatly doubt whether any one of the American States, 
except, perhaps, Oregon, has, at this moment, more woodland 
than it ought permanently to preserve, though, no doubt, a 
different distribution of the forests in all of them might be 
highly advantageous. It is a great misfortune to the Amer¬ 
ican Union that the State Governments have so generally 
disposed of their original domain to private citizens. It is 

ferent land measures known by the name of Morgen, varying from about 
one third of an acre to more than three acres in value. When will the 
world be wise enough to unite in adopting the French metrical and mone¬ 
tary systems ? As to the latter, never while Christendom continues to be 
ruled by money changers, who can compel you to part with your sover¬ 
eigns in France at twenty-five francs, and in England to accept fifteen shil¬ 
lings for your napoleons. I speak as a sufferer. Experto crede Roberto. 


302 


AMERICAN FORESTS. 


true that public property is not sufficiently respected in the 
United States ; and it is also true that, within the memory of 
almost every man of mature age, timber was of so little value 
in that country, that the owners of private woodlands sub¬ 
mitted, almost without complaint, to what would be regarded 
elsewhere as very aggravated trespasses upon them.* Under 

* According to the maxims of English jurisprudence, the common law 
consists of general customs so long established that “ the memory of man 
runneth not to the contrary.” In other words, long custom makes law 
In new countries, the change of circumstances creates new customs, and, 
in time, new law, without the aid of legislation. Had the American colo¬ 
nists observed a more sparing economy in the treatment of their woods, a 
new code of customary forest law would have sprung up and acquired the 
force of a statute. Popular habit was fast elaborating the fundamental 
principles of such a code, when the rapid increase in the value of timber, 
in consequence of the reckless devastation of the woodlands, made it the 
interest of the proprietors to interfere with this incipient system of forest 
jurisprudence, and appeal to the rules of English law for the protection 
of their woods. The courts have sustained these appeals, and forest prop¬ 
erty is now legally as inviolable as any other, though common opinion 
still combats the course of judicial decision on such questions. 

In the United States, swarms of honey bees, on leaving the parent 
hive, often take up their quarters in hollow trees in the neighboring 
woods. By the early customs of New England, the finder of a u bee tree” 
on the land of another owner was regarded as entitled to the honey by 
right of discovery ; and as a necessary incident of that right, he might cut 
the tree, at the proper season, without asking permission of the proprietor 
of the soil. The quantity of “ wild honey ” in a tree was often large, and 
“ bee hunting ” was so profitable that it became almost a regular pro¬ 
fession. The “ bee hunter ” sallied forth with a small box containing 
honey and a little vermilion. The bees which were attracted by the 
honey marked themselves with the vermilion, and hence were more 
readily followed in their homeward flight, and recognized when they re¬ 
turned a second time for booty. When loaded with spoil, this insect re¬ 
turns to his hive by the shortest route, and hence a straight line is popu¬ 
larly called in America a “ bee line.” By such a line, the hunter followed 
the bees to their sylvan hive, marked the tree with his initials, and re¬ 
turned to secure his prize in the autumn. When the right of the “ bee 
hunter ” was at last disputed by the land proprietors, it was with difficulty 
that judgments could be obtained, in inferior courts, in favor of the latter, 
and it was only after repeated decisions of the higher legal tribunals that 
the superior right of the owner of the soil was at last acquiesced in. 


ECONOMY OF THE FOREST. 


303 


such circumstances, it is difficult to protect the forest, whether 
it belong to the state or to individuals. Property of this kind 
would be subject to much plunder, as well as to frequent 
damage by fire. The destruction from these causes would, 
indeed, considerably lessen, but would not wholly annihilate 
the climatic and geographical influences of the forest, or ruin¬ 
ously diminish its value as a regular source of supply of fuel 
and timber. For prevention of the evils upon which I have 
so long dwelt, the American people must look to the diffusion 
of general intelligence on this subject, and to the enlightened 
self interest, for which they are remarkable, not to the action 
of their local or general legislatures. Even in France, govern¬ 
ment has moved with too slow and hesitating a pace, and pre¬ 
ventive measures do not yet compensate destructive causes. 
The judicious remarks of Troy on this point may w r ell be 
applied to other countries than France, other measures of 
public policy than the preservation of the woods. “ To move 
softly,” says he, “ is to commit the most dangerous, the most 
unpardonable of imprudences; it diminishes the prestige of 
authority; it furnishes a triumph to the sneerer and the in¬ 
credulous ; it strengthens opposition and encourages resist¬ 
ance ; it ruins the administration in the opinion of the people, 
weakens its power and depresses its courage.” * 

The Economy of the Forest. 

The legislation of European states upon sylviculture, and 
the practice of that art, divide themselves into two great 
branches—the preservation of existing forests, and the creation 
of new. From the long operation of causes already set forth, 
what is understood in America and other new countries by 
the “ primitive forest,” no longer exists in the territories which 
were the seats of ancient civilization and empire, except upon 
a small scale, and in remote and almost inaccessible glens, quite 
out of the reach of ordinary observation. The oldest European 
woods, indeed, are native, that is, sprung from sell-sown seed, 

* Etude mr le Rebowement des Montagues , p. 5. 


304 


ECONOMY OF THE FOREST. 


or from the roots of trees which have been felled for human 
purposes; hut their growth has been controlled, in a variety 
of ways, by man and by domestic animals, and they always 
present more or less of an artificial character and arrangement. 
Both they and planted forests, which, though certainly not 
few, are of recent date in Europe, demand, as well for protec¬ 
tion as for promotion of growth, a treatment different in some 
respects from that which would be suited to the character and 
wants of the virgin wood. 

On this latter branch of the subject, experience and obser¬ 
vation have not yet collected a sufficient stock of facts to serve 
for the construction of a complete system of sylviculture ; but 
the management of the forest as it exists in France—the dif¬ 
ferent zones and climates of which country present many points 
of analogy with those of the United States and some of the 
British colonies—has been carefully studied, and several man¬ 
uals of practice have been prepared for the foresters of that 
empire. I believe the best of these is the Cours Elementaire 
de Culture des Bois cree d VEcole Forestiere de Fancy, par 
M. Lorentz , complete et publie pa/r A. Parade , with a supple¬ 
ment under the title of Cours d’ Amenagement des Forets , par 
Henri Fanquette. The Etudes sur V Economie Forestiere , par 
Jules Clave , which I have often quoted, presents a great num¬ 
ber of interesting views on this subject, and well deserves to 
be translated for the use of the English and American reader ; 
but it is not designed as a practical guide, and it does not 
profess to be sufficiently specific in its details to serve that 
purpose. Notwithstanding the difference of conditions be¬ 
tween the aboriginal and the trained forest, the judicious 
observer who aims at the preservation of the former will reap 
much instruction from the treatises I have cited, and I believe 
he will be convinced that the sooner a natural wood is brought 
into the state of an artificially regulated one, the better it is 
for all the multiplied interests which depend on the wise ad¬ 
ministration of this branch of public economy.* 

* “ In America,” says Clave (p. 124, 125), “ where there is a vast ex¬ 
tent of land almost without pecuniary value, but where labor is dear and 


QUALITY OF TIMBER. 


305 


One consideration bearing on this subject lias received less 
attention than it merits, because most persons interested in 
such questions have not opportunities for the comparison I 
refer to. I mean the great general superiority of cultivated 
timber to that of strictly spontaneous growth. I say general 
superiority, because there are exceptions to the rule. The 
white pine, Pinus strobus , for instance, and other trees of sim¬ 
ilar character and uses, require, for their perfect growth, a 
density of forest vegetation around them, which protects them 
from too much agitation by wind, and from the persistence of 
the lateral branches which fill the w r ood with knots. A pine 
which has grown under those conditions possesses a tall, 
straight stem, admirably fitted for masts and spars, and, at the 
same time, its wood is almost wholly free from knots, is reg¬ 
ular in annular structure, soft and uniform in texture, and, 
consequently, superior to almost all other timber for joinery. 
If, while a large pine is spared, the broad-leaved or other 

the rate of interest high, it is profitable to till a large surface at the least 
possible cost; extensive cultivation is there the most advantageous. In 
England, France, and Germany, where every corner of soil is occupied, 
and the least bit of ground is sold at a high price, but where labor and 
capital are comparatively cheap, it is wisest to employ intensive cultiva¬ 
tion. * * * All the efforts of the cultivator ought to be directed to 

the obtaining of a given result with the least sacrifice, and there is equally 
a loss to the commonwealth if the application of improved agricultural 
processes be neglected where they are advantageous, or if they be em¬ 
ployed where they are not required. * * * In this point of view, 
sylviculture must follow the same laws as agriculture, and, like it, be 
modified according to the economical conditions of different states. In 
countries abounding in good forests, and thinly peopled, elementary and 
cheap methods must be pursued ; in civilized regions, where a dense pop¬ 
ulation requires that the soil shall be made to produce all it can yield, the 
regular artificial forest, with all the processes that science teaches, should 
be cultivated. It would be absurd to apply to the endless woods of Brazil 
and of Canada the method of the Spessart by “ double stages,” and not 
less so in our country, where every yard of ground has a high value, to 
leave to nature the task of propagating trees, and to content ourselves 
with cutting, every twenty or twenty-five years, the meagre growths that 
chance may have produced.” 

20 





806 


THE ARTIFICIAL FOREST. 


smaller trees around it are felled, the swaying of the tree from 
the action of the wind mechanically produces separations 
between the layers of annual grow T th, and greatly diminishes 
the value of the timber. 

The same defect is often observed in pines which, from 
some accident of growth, have much overtopped their fellows 
in the virgin forest. The white pine, growing in the fields, or 
in open glades in the woods, is totally different from the true 
forest tree, both in general aspect and in quality of wood. Its 
stem is much shorter, its top less tapering, its foliage denser 
and more inclined to gather into tufts, its branches more 
numerous and of larger diameter, its wood shows much more 
distinctly the divisions of annual growth, is of coarser grain, 
harder and more difficult to work into mitre joints. Inter¬ 
mixed with the most valuable pines in the American forests, 
are met many trees of the character I have just described. 
The lumbermen call them u saplings,” and generally regard 
them as different in species from the true white pine, but bot¬ 
anists are unable to establish a distinction between them, and 
as they agree in almost all respects with trees grown in the 
open grounds from known white-pine seedlings, I believe their 
peculiar character is due to unfavorable circumstances in their 
early growth. The pine, then, is an exception to the general 
rule as to the inferiority of the forest to the open-ground tree. 
The pasture oak and pasture beech, on the contrary, are well 
known to produce far better timber than those grown in the 
woods, and there are few trees to which the remark is not 
equally applicable.* 

* It is often laid down as a universal law, that the wood of trees of 
slow vegetation is superior to that of quick growth. This is one of those 
commonplaces by which men love to shield themselves from the labor of 
painstaking observation. It has, in fact, so many exceptions, that it may 
be doubted whether it is in any sense true. Most of the cedars are slow 
of growth ; but while the timber of some of them is firm and durable, that 
of others is light, brittle, and perishable. The hemlock spruce is slower 
of growth than the pines, but its wood is of very little value. The pasture 
oak and beech show a breadth of grain—and, of course, an annual incre- 


THE ARTIFICIAL FOREST. 


307 


Another advantage of the artificially regulated forest is, 
that it admits of such grading of the ground as to favor the 
retention or discharge of water at will, while the facilities it 
affords for selecting and duly proportioning, as well as prop¬ 
erly spacing, the trees which compose it, are too obvious to 
require to he more than hinted at. In conducting these opera¬ 
tions, we must have a diligent eye to the requirements of 
nature, and must remember that a wood is not an arbitrary 
assemblage of trees to be selected and disposed according to 
the caprice of its owner. “ A forest,” says Clave, “ is not, as 
is often supposed, a simple collection of trees succeeding each 
other in long perspective, without bond of union, and capable 
of isolation from each other; it is, on the contrary, a whole, 
the different parts of which are interdependent upon each 
other, and it constitutes, so to speak, a true individuality. 
Every forest has a special character, determined by the form 
of the surface it grows upon, the kinds of trees that compose * 
it, and the manner in which they are grouped.” * 

raent—twice as great as trees of the same species grown in the woods; and 
the American locust, Eobinia pseudacacia , the wood of which is of ex¬ 
treme toughness and durability, is, of all trees indigenous to Northeastern 
America, by far the most rapid in growth. 

As an illustration of the mutual interdependence of the mechanic arts, 

I may mention that in Italy, where stone, brick, and plaster are almost the 
only materials used in architecture, and where the “ hollow ware ” kitchen 
implements are of copper or of clay, the ordinary tools for working wood 
are of a very inferior description, and the locust timber is found too hard 
for their temper. Southey informs us, in “ Espriella’s Letters,” that when a 
email quantity of mahogany was brought to England, early in the last 
century, the cabinetmakers were unable to use it, from the defective tem¬ 
per of their tools, until the demand for furniture from the new wood com¬ 
pelled them to improve the quality of their implements. In America, the 
cheapness of wood long made it the preferable material for almost all pur¬ 
poses to which it could by any possibility be applied. I he mechanical 
cutlery and artisans’ tools of the United States are of admirable temper, 
finish, and convenience, and no wood is too hard, or otherwise too refrac¬ 
tory, to be wrought with great facility, both by hand tools and by the 
multitude of ingenious machines which the Americans have invented for 
this purpose. 

* fitudes Forestieres , p. 7. 



308 


VARIETY OF TREES IN AMERICA. 


European and American Trees compared . 

Tlie woods of North America are strikingly distinguished 
from those of Europe by the vastly greater variety of species 
they contain. According to Clave, there are in u France and 
in most parts of Europe 55 only about twenty forest trees, five 
or six of which are spike leaved and resinous, the remainder 
broad-leaved.” * Our author, however, doubtless means gen¬ 
era, though he uses the word especes. Rossmassler enumerates 
fifty-seven species of forest trees as found in Germany, but 
some of these are mere shrubs, some are fruit and properly 
garden trees, and some others are only varieties of familiar 
species. The valuable manual of Parade describes about the 
same number, including, however, two of American origin— 
the locust, Robinia pseudacacia, and the Weymouth or white 
pine, Pinus strobus —and the cedar of Lebanon from Asia, 
though it is indigenous in Algeria also. We may then safely 
say that Europe does not possess above forty or fifty trees of 
such economical value as to be worth the special care of the 
forester, while the oak alone numbers not less than thirty 
species in the United States,f and some other North American 
genera are almost equally diversified.^; 

* Etudes Forestieres , p. 7. 

t For very full catalogues of American forest trees, and remarks on 
their geographical distribution, consult papers on the subject by Dr. J. G. 
Cooper, in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1858, and the 
Report of the United States Patent Office, Agricultural Division, for 1860. 

t Although Spenser’s catalogue of trees occurs in the first canto of the 
first book of the “ Faery Queene ’’—the only canto of that exquisite poem 
actually read by most students of English literature—it is not so generally 
familiar as to make the quotation of it altogether superfluous : 

VII. 

Enforst to Beeke some covert nigh at hand, 

A shadie grove not farr away they epide, 

That promist ayde the tempest to withstand ; 

Whose loftie trees, yclad with sommers pride, 

Did spred so broad, that heavens light did hide, 

Not perceable with power of any starr : 

And all within were pathes and alleies wide, 

With footing worne, and leading inward farr ; 

Faire harbour that them seems ; so in they entred ar. 


EUROPEAN TREES. 


309 


Few European trees, except those bearing edible fruit, have 
been naturalized in the United States, while the American 
forest flora has made large contributions to that of Europe. It 
is a very poor taste which has led to the substitution of the 
less picturesque European for the graceful and majestic Amer¬ 
ican elm, in some public grounds in the United States. On 
the other hand, the European mountain ash—which in beauty 
and healthfulness of growth is superior to our own—the horse 
chestnut, and the abele, or silver poplar, are valuable additions 
to the ornamental trees of North America. The Swiss arve 
or zirbelkiefer, Pinus cembra , which yields a well-flavored 
edible seed and furnishes excellent wood for carving, the um¬ 
brella pine which also bears a seed agreeable to the taste, and 
which, from the color of its foliage and the beautiful form of 
its dome-like crown, is among the most elegant of trees, the 
white birch of Central Europe, with its pendulous branches 
almost rivalling those of the weeping willow in length, flexi¬ 
bility, and gracefulness of fall, and, especially, the “ cypresse 
funerall,” might be introduced into the United States with 
great advantage to the landscape. The European beech and 
chestnut furnish timber of far better quality than that of their 
American congeners. The fruit of the European chestnut, 

Till. 

And foorth they passe, with pleasure forward led, 

Joying to heare the hirdes sweete harmony, 

Which therein shrouded from the tempest dred, 

Seemd in their song to soorne the cruell sky. 

Much can they praise the trees so straight and hy, 

The 6ayling pine ; the cedar stout and tall; 

The vine-propp elm ; the poplar never dry ; 

The builder oake, sole king of forrests all; 

The aspine good for staves ; the cypresse funerall ; 

i x. 

The laurell, meed of might!e conquerours 

And poets sage ; the firre that weepeth still; 

The willow, worne of forlorn paramours ; 

The eugh. obedient to the benders will; 

The birch for shaftes ; the sallow for the mill ; 

The mirrhe sweete-bleeding in the bitter wound ; 

The warlike beech ; the ash for nothing ill; 

The fruitfull olive ; and the platane round ; 

The carver holme ; the maple seeldom inward sound. 


310 


EUROPEAN TREES. 


though inferior to the American in flavor, is larger, and is an 
important article of diet among the French and Italian peas¬ 
antry. The walnut of Europe, though not equal to some of the 
American species in beauty of growth or of wood, or to others 
in strength and elasticity of fibre, is valuable for its timber and 
its oil.* The maritime pine, which has proved of such im¬ 
mense use in fixing drifting sands in France, may perhaps be 
better adapted to this purpose than any of the pines of the 
New World, and it is of great importance for its turpentine, 
resin, and tar. The epicea, or common fir, Abies picea, Abies 

* The walnut is a more valuable tree than is generally supposed. It 
yields one third of the oil produced in France, and in this respect occupies 
an intermediate position between the olive of the south, and the oleaginous 
seeds of the north. A hectare (about two and a half acres), will produce 
nuts to the value of five hundred francs a year, which cost nothing hut 
the gathering. Unfortunately, its maturity must be long waited for, and 
more nut-trees are felled than planted. The demand for its wood in 
cabinet work is the principal cause of its destruction. See Laveeoxe, 
Economie Rurale de la France, p. 253. 

According to Cosimo Ridolfi (Lezioni Orali, ii. p. 424), France obtains 
three times as much oil from the walnut as from the olive, and nearly as 
much as from all oleaginous seeds together. He states that the walnut bears 
nuts at the age of twenty years, and yields its maximum product at seventy, 
and that a hectare of ground, with thirty trees, or twelve to the acre, is 
equal to a capital of twenty-five hundred francs. 

The nut of this tree is known in the United States as the “ English 
walnut.” The fruit and the wood much resemble those of the American 
black walnut, Juglans nigra , but for cabinet work the American is the 
more beautiful material, especially when the large knots are employed. 
The timber of the European species, when straight grained, and clear , or 
free from knots, is, for ordinary purposes, better than that of the American 
black walnut, but bears no comparison with the wood of the hickory, when 
strength combined with elasticity is required, and its nut is very inferior 
in taste to that of the shagbark, as well as to the butternut, which it some¬ 
what resembles. 

“The chestnut is more valuable still, for it produces on a sterile soil, 
which, without it, would yield only ferns and heaths, an abundant nutri¬ 
ment for man.” —Lavekgne, Economie Rurale de la France , p. 253. 

I believe the varieties developed by cultivation are less numerous in 
the walnut than in the chestnut, which latter tree is often grafted in 
Southern Europe. 


TREES OF SOUTHERN EUROPE. 


311 


excelsa , JPicea excelsa , abundant in the mountains of France 
and the contiguous country, is known for its product, Bur¬ 
gundy pitch, and, as it flourishes in a greater variety of soil 
and climate than almost any other spike-leaved tree, it might 
be well worth transplantation.* The cork oak has been intro¬ 
duced into the United States, I believe, and would undoubt¬ 
edly thrive in the Southern section of the Union.f 

In the walnut, the chestnut, the cork oak, the mulberry, 
the olive, the orange, the lemon, the fig, and the multitude of 
other trees which, by their fruit, or by other products, yield 
an annual revenue, nature has provided Southern Europe with 

* This fir is remarkable for its tendency to cicatrize or heal over its 
stumps, a property which it possesses in common with some other firs, the 
maritime pine, and the European larch. When these trees grow in thick 
clumps, their roots are apt to unite by a species of natural grafting, and 
if one of them be felled, although its own proper rootlets die, the stump 
may continue, sometimes for a century, to receive nourishment from the 
radicles of the surrounding trees, and a dome of wood and bark of con¬ 
siderable thickness be formed over it. The cicatrization is, however, only 
apparent, for the entire stump, except the outside ring of annual growth, 
soon dies, and even decays within its covering, without sending out new 
shoots. 

t At the age of twelve or fifteen years, the cork tree is stripped of its 
outer bark for the first time. This first yield is of inferior quality, and is 
employed for floats for nets and buoys, or burnt for lampblack. After this, 
a new layer of cork, an inch or an inch and a quarter in thickness, is formed 
about once in ten years, and is removed in large sheets without injury to 
the tree, which lives a hundred and fifty years or more. According to 
Clave (p. 252), the annual product of a forest of cork oaks is calculated at 
about 660 kilogrammes, worth 150 francs, to the hectare, which, deducting 
expenses, leaves a profit of 100 francs. This is about equal, to 250 pound 
weight, and eight dollars profit to the acre. The cork oaks of the national 
domain in Algeria cover about 500,000 acres, and are let to individuals at 
rates which are expected, when the whole is rented, to yield to the state 
a revenue of about $2,000,000. 

George Sand, in the Histoire de ma Vie , speaks of the cork forests in 
Southern France as among the most profitable of rural possessions, and 
states, what I do not remember to have seen noticed elsewhere, that Russia 
is the best customer for cork. The large sheets taken from the trees are 
slit into thin plates, and used to line the walls of apartments in that cold 
climate. 


312 


TREES OF SOUTHERN EUROPE. 


a partial compensation for the loss of the native forest. It is 
true that these trees, planted as most of them are, at such dis¬ 
tances as to admit of cultivation, or to the growth ol grass 
among them, are hut an inadequate substitute for the thick 
and shady wood; but they perform to a certain extent the 
same offices of absorption and transpiration, they shade the 
surface of the ground, they serve to break the force of the 
wind, and on many a steep declivity, many a bleak and barren 
hillside, the chestnut binds the soil together with its roots, and 
prevents tons of earth and gravel from washing down upon 
the fields and the gardens. Fruit trees are not wanting, cer¬ 
tainly, north of the Alps. The apple, the pear, and the prune 
are important in the economy both of man and of nature, but 
they are far less numerous in Switzerland and Northern 
France than are the trees I have mentioned, in Southern 
Europe, both because they are in general less remunerative, 
and because the climate, in higher latitudes, does not permit 
the free introduction of shade trees into grounds occupied for 
agricultural purposes.* 

The multitude of species, intermixed as they are, in their 
spontaneous growth, gives the American forest landscape a 
variety of aspect not often seen in the woods of Europe, and 

* The walnut, the chestnut, the apple, and the pear are common to 
the border between the countries I have mentioned, but the range of the 
other trees is bounded by the Alps, and by a well-defined and sharply 
drawn line to the west of those mountains. I cannot give statistical details 
as to the number of any of the trees in question, or as to the area they 
would cover if brought together in a given country. From some peculi¬ 
arity in the sky of Europe, cultivated plants will thrive, in Northern Italy, 
in Southern France, and even in Switzerland, under a depth of shade 
where no crop, not even grass, worth harvesting, would grow in the 
United States with an equally high summer temperature. Hence the 
cultivation of all these trees is practicable in Europe to a greater extent 
than would be supposed reconcilable with the interests of agriculture. 
Some idea of the importance of the olive orchards may be formed from 
the fact that Sicily alone, an island scarcely exceeding 10,000 square miles 
in area, of which one third at least is absolutely barren, has exported to 
the single port of Marseilles more than 2,000,000 pounds weight of olive 
oii per year, for the last twenty years. 


THE AMERICAN FORESTS. 


313 


the gorgeous tints, which nature repeats horn the dying dol¬ 
phin to paint the falling leaf of the American maples, oaks, 
and ash trees, clothe the hillsides and fringe the watercourses 
with a rainbow splendor of foliage, unsurpassed by the bright¬ 
est groupings of the tropical flora. It must be admitted, how¬ 
ever, that both the northern and the southern declivities of 
the Alps exhibit a nearer approximation to this rich and mul¬ 
tifarious coloring of autumnal vegetation than most American 
travellers in Europe are willing to allow ; and, besides, the 
small deciduous shrubs which often carpet the forest glades of 
these mountains are dyed with a ruddy and orange glow, 
which, in the distant landscape, is no mean substitute for the 
scarlet and crimson and gold and amber of the transatlantic 
woodland. 

No American evergreen known to me resembles the um¬ 
brella pine sufficiently to be a fair object of comparison with 
it.* A cedar, very common above the Highlands on the 
Hudson, is extremely like the cypress, straight, slender, with 
erect, compressed ramification, and feathered to the ground, 
but its foliage is neither so dark nor so dense, the tree does not 
attain the majestic height of the cypress, nor has it the lithe 
flexibility of that tree. In mere shape, the Lombardy poplar 
nearly resembles this latter, but it is almost a profanation to 
compare the two, especially when they are agitated by the 
wind ; for under such circumstances, the one is the most ma¬ 
jestic, the other the most ungraceful, or—if I may apply such 
an expression to anything but human affectation of movement 
—the most awkward of trees. The poplar trembles before the 
blast, flutters, struggles wildly, dishevels its foliage, gropes 
around with its feeble branches, and hisses as in impotent 
passion. The cypress gathers its limbs still more closely to its 
stem, bows a gracious salute rather than an humble obeisance 

* It is hard to say how far the peculiar form of the graceful crown of 
this pine is due to pruning. It is true that the extremities of the topmost 
branches are rarely lopped, but the lateral boughs are almost uniformly 
removed to a very considerable height, and it is not improbable that the 
shape of the top is thereby affected. 


314 


EVERGREENS OF SOUTHERN EUROFE. 


to tlie tempest, bends to the wind with an elasticity that 
assures you of its prompt return to its regal attitude, and sends 
from its thick leaflets a murmur like the roar of the far-off 
ocean. 

The cypress and the umbrella pine are not merely conven¬ 
tional types of the Italian landscape. They are essential ele¬ 
ments in a field of rural beauty which can be seen in perfec¬ 
tion only in the basin of the Mediterranean, and they are as 
characteristic of this class of scenery as the date palm is of the 
Eastern desert. There is, however, this difference: a single 
cypress or pine is often enough to shed beauty over a wide 
area; the palm is a social tree, and its beauty is not so much 
that of the individual as of the group. The frequency of the 
cypress and the pine—combined with the fact that the other 
trees of Southern Europe which most interest a stranger from 
the north, the orange and the lemon, the cork oak, the ilex, 
the myrtle, and the laurel, are evergreens—goes far to explain 
the beauty of the winter scenery of Italy. Indeed it is only in 
the winter that a tourist who confines himself to wheel car¬ 
riages and high roads can acquire any notion of the face of the 
earth, and form any proper geographical image of that coun¬ 
try. At other seasons, not high walls only, but equally imper¬ 
vious hedges, and now, unhappily, acacias thickly planted 
along the railway routes, confine the view so completely, that 
the arch of a tunnel, or a night cap over the traveller’s eyes, 
is scarcely a more effectual obstacle to the gratification of his 
curiosity.* 

* Besides this, in a country so diversified in surface—I wish we could 
with the French say accidented —as Italy with the exception of the 
champaign region drained by the Po, every new field of view requires 
either an extraordinary coup d'c&il in the spectator, or a long study, in 
order to master its relief, its plans, its salient and retreating angles. In 
summer, the universal greenery confounds light and shade, distance and 
foreground; and though the impression upon a traveller, who journeys for 
the sake of “ sensations,” may be strengthened by the mysterious annihi¬ 
lation of all standards for the measurement of space, yet the superior 
intelligibility of the winter scenery of Italy is more profitable to those 
who see with a view to analyze. 


THE TAILLIS OR COPPICE. 


315 


Sylviculture. 

The art, or, as the Continental foresters call it, the science 
of sylviculture has been so little pursued in England and 
America, that its nomenclature has not been introduced into 
the English vocabulary, and I shall not be able to describe its 
processes with technical propriety of language, without occa¬ 
sionally borrowing a word from the forest literature of France 
and Germany. A full discussion of the methods of sylvicul¬ 
ture would, indeed, be out of place in a work like the present, 
but the almost total want of conveniently accessible means of 
information on the subject, in English-speaking countries, will 
justify me in presenting it with somewhat more of detail than 
woidd otherwise be pertinent. 

The two best known methods are those distinguished as 
the taillis , copse or coppice treatment,* and the futaie , for which 
I find no English equivalent, but which may not inappro¬ 
priately be called the full-growth system. A taillis , copse, or 
coppice, is a wood composed of shoots from the roots of trees 
previously cut for fuel and timber. The shoots are thinned 
out from time to time, and finally cut, either after a fixed 
number of years, or after the young trees have attained to cer¬ 
tain dimensions, their roots being then left to send out a new 
progeny as before. This is the cheapest method oi manage¬ 
ment, and therefore the best wherever the price of labor and 
of capital bears a high proportion to that of land and of tim¬ 
ber ; but it is essentially a wasteful economy. If the wood¬ 
land is, in the first place, completely cut over, as is found most 
convenient in practice, the young shoots have neither the shade 
nor the protection from wind so important to forest growth; 
and their progress is comparatively slow, wdiile, at the samp 
time, the thick clumps they form choke the seedlings that may 

* Copse, or coppice, from the French couper, to cut, signifies properly 
a wood the trees of which are cut at certain periods of immature growth, 
and allowed to shoot up again from the roots ; but it has come to signify, 
very commonly, a young wood, grove, or thicket, without leteience to its 
origin, or to its character of a forest crop. 


316 


THE TAILLTS OR COPPICE. 


have sprouted near them. If domestic animals of any species 
are allowed to roam in the wood, they browse upon the ter¬ 
minal buds and the tender branches, thereby stunting, if they 
do not kill, the young trees, and depriving them of all beauty 
and vigor of growth. The evergreens, once cut, do not shoot 
up again,* and the mixed character of the forest—in many 
respects an important advantage, if not an indispensable con¬ 
dition of growth—is lost; f and besides this, large wood of 

* It has been recently stated, upon the evidence of the Government 
foresters of Greece, and of the queen’s gardener, that a large wood has 
been discovered in Arcadia, consisting of a fir which has the property of 
sending up both vertical and lateral shoots from the stump of felled trees 
and forming a new crown. It was at first supposed that this forest grew 
only on the “mountains,” of which the hero of About’s most amusing story, 
Le Roi des Montagues , was “king; ” but it is now said that small stumps, 
with the shoots attached, have been sent to Germany, and recognized by 
able botanists as true natural products. 

t Natural forests are rarely, if ever, composed of trees of a single 
species, and experience has shown that oaks and other broad-leaved trees, 
planted as artificial woods, require to be mixed, or associated with others 
of different habits. 

In the forest of Fontainebleau, “oaks, mingled with beeches in due 
proportion,” says Clav6, “may arrive at the age of five or six hundred 
years in full vigor, and attain dimensions which I have never seen sur¬ 
passed ; when, however, they are wholly unmixed with other trees, they 
begin to decay and die at the top, at the age of forty or fifty years, like 
men, old before their time, weary of the world, and longing only to quit 
it. This has been observed in most of the oak plantations of which I have 
spoken, and they have not been able to attain to full growth. When the 
vegetation was perceived to languish, they were cut, in the hope that this 
operation would restore their vigor, and that the new shoots would suc¬ 
ceed better than the original trees; and, in fact, they seemed to be recover¬ 
ing for the first few years. But the shoots were soon attacked by the 
same decay, and the operation had to be renewed at shorter and shorter 
intervals, until at last it was found necessary to treat as coppices planta¬ 
tions originally designed for the full-growth system. Nor was this all: 
the soil, periodically bared by these cuttings, became impoverished, and 
less and less suited to the growth of the oak. * * * It was then pro¬ 
posed to introduce the pine and plant with it the vacancies and glades. 
* * * By this means, the forest was saved from the ruin which threat¬ 
ened it, and now more than 10,000 acres of pines, from fifteen to thirty 


FUTAIE, OR FULL-GROWTH SYSTEM. 


317 


any species cannot be grown in this method, because trees 
which shoot from decaying stumps and their dying roots, 
become hollow or otherwise unsound before they acquire their 
full dimensions. A more fatal objection still, is, that the roots 
of trees will not bear more than two or three, or at most four 
cuttings of their shoots before their vitality is exhausted, and 
the wood can then be restored only by replanting entirely. 
The period of cutting coppices varies in Europe from fifteen to 
forty years, according to soil, species, and rapidity of growth. 

In the fiddle, or full-growtli system, the trees are allowed 
to stand as long as they continue in healthy and vigorous 
growth. This is a shorter period than would be at first sup¬ 
posed, when we consider the advanced age and great dimen¬ 
sions to which, under favorable circumstances, many forest 
trees attain in temperate climates. But, as every observing 
person familiar with the natural forest is aware, these are ex¬ 
ceptional cases, just as are instances of great longevity or of 
gigantic stature among men. Able vegetable physiologists 
have maintained that the tree, like most reptiles, has no nat¬ 
ural limit of life or of growth, and that the only reason why 
our oaks and our pines do not reach the age of twenty cen¬ 
turies and the height of a hundred fathoms, is, that in the 
multitude of accidents to which they are exposed, the chances 
of their attaining to such a length of years and to such dimen¬ 
sions of growth are a million to one against them. But 
another explanation of this fact is possible. In trees affected 
by no discoverable external cause of death, decay begins at the 
topmost branches, which seem to wither and die for want of 
nutriment. The mysterious force by which the sap is carried 

years old, are disseminated at various points, sometimes intermixed with 
broad-leaved trees, sometimes forming groves by themselves .”—Revue de& 
Deux Mondes , Mai, 1863, pp. 153,154. 

The forests of Denmark, which, in modern times, have been succeeded 
by the beech—a species more inclined to be exclusive than any other 
broad-leaved tree—were composed of birches, oaks, firs, aspens, willows, 
hazel, and maple, the first three being the leading species. At present, 
the beech greatly predominates.— Vaupell, Bogens Indvandring, pp. 19, 20. 


318 FUTAIE, OR FULL-GROWTH SYSTEM. 

from tlie roots to the utmost twigs, cannot be conceived to be 
unlimited in power, and it is probable that it differs in dif¬ 
ferent species, so that while it may suffice to raise the fluid to 
the height of five hundred feet in the sequoia, it may not be 
able to carry it beyond one hundred and fifty in the oak. The 
limit may be different, too, in different trees of the same spe¬ 
cies, not from defective organization in those of inferior 
growth, but from more or less favorable conditions of soil, 
nourishment, and exposure. Whenever a tree attains to the 
limit beyond which its circulating fluids cannot rise, we may 
suppose that decay begins, and death follows, from the same 
causes which bring about the same results in animals of lim¬ 
ited size—such, for example, as the interruption of functions 
essential to life, in consequence of the clogging up of ducts by 
matter assimilable in the stage of growth, but no longer so 
when increment has ceased. 

In the natural woods, we observe that, though, among the 
myriads of trees which grow upon a square mile, there are 
several vegetable giants, yet the great majority of them begin 
to decay long before they have attained their maximum of 
stature, and this seems to be still more emphatically true of 
the artificial forest. In France, according to Clave, “ oaks, in 
a suitable soil, may stand, without exhibiting any sign of 
decay, for two or three hundred years; the pines hardly ex¬ 
ceed one hundred and twenty, and the soft or white woods 
[hois llanos ], in wet soils, languish and die before reaching the 
fiftieth year.” * These ages are certainly below the average of 
those of American forest trees, and are greatly exceeded in 
very numerous well-attested instances of isolated trees in 
Europe. 

The former mode of treating the futaie, called the garden 
system, was to cut the trees individually as they arrived at 
maturity, but, in the best regulated forests, this practice has 
been abandoned for the German method, which embraces not 
only the securing of the largest immediate profit, but the re- 


* Etudes Forestttres, p. 89. 


FUTAIE, OR FULL-GROWTH SYSTEM. 


319 


planting of the forest, and the care of the young growth. This 
is effected in the case of a forest, whether natural or artificial, 
which is to he subjected to regular management, by three 
operations. The first of these consists in felling about one 
third of the wood, in such way as to leave convenient spaces 
for the growth of young trees. The remaining two-thirds are 
relied upon to replant the vacancies, by natural sowing, which 
they seldom or never fail to do. The seedlings are watched, 
are thinned out when too dense, the ill formed and sickly, as 
well as those of inferior value, and the shrubs and thorns 
which might otherwise choke or too closely shade them, are 
pulled up. When they have attained sufficient strength and 
development of foliage to bear or to require more light and 
air, the second step is taken, by removing a suitable propor¬ 
tion of the old trees which had been spared at the first cutting; 
and when, finally, they are hardened enough to bear frost and 
sun without other protection than that which they mutually 
give to each other, the remainder of the original forest is felled, 
and the wood now consists wholly of young and vigorous trees. 
This result is obtained after about twenty years. At con¬ 
venient periods afterward, the unhealthy stocks and those 
injured by wind or other accidents are removed, and in some 
instances the growth of the remainder is promoted by irriga- 
ation or by fertilizing applications.* When the forest is ap- 

* The grounds which it is most important to clothe with wood as a 
conservative influence, and which, also, can best he spared from agricul¬ 
tural use, are steep hillsides. But the performance of all the oflices of the 
forester to the tree—seeding, planting, thinning, and finally felling and re¬ 
moving for consumption—is more laborious upon a rapid declivity than on 
a level soil, and at the same time it is difficult to apply irrigation or 
manures to trees so situated. Experience has shown that there is great 
advantage in terracing the face of a hill before planting it, both as pre¬ 
venting the wash of the earth by checking the flow of water down its 
slope, and as presenting a surface favorable for irrigation, as well as for 
manuring and cultivating the tree. But even without so expensive a pro¬ 
cess, very important results have been obtained by simply ditcliing de¬ 
clivities. “ In order to hasten the growth of wood on the flanks of a moun¬ 
tain, Mr. Eugene Chevandier divided the slope into zones forty or fifty 


320 


FUTAIEj OR FULL-GROWTH SYSTEM. 

proaching to maturity, the original processes already desciibed 
are repeated; and as, in different parts of an extensive forest, 

feet wide, by horizontal ditches closed at both ends, and thereby obtained, 
from firs of different ages, shoots double the dimensions of those which 
grew on a dry soil of the same character, where the water was allowed to 
run off without obstruction.”—D umont, Des Travaux Publics , etc., pp. 
94-96. 

The ditches were about two feet and a half deep, and three feet and a 
half wide, and they cost about forty francs the hectare, or three dollars the 
acre. This extraordinary growth was produced wholly by the retention 
of the rain water in the ditches, whence it filtered through the whole soil 
and supplied moisture to the roots of the trees. It may be doubted 
whether in a climate cold enough to freeze the entire contents of the 
ditches in winter, it would not be expedient to draw off the water in the 
autumn, as the presence of so large a quantity of ice in the soil might prove 
injurious to trees too young and small to shelter the ground effectually 
against frost. 

Chevandier computes that, if the annual growth of the pine in the 
marshy soil of the Vosges be represented by one, it will equal two in dry 
ground, four or five on slopes so ditched or graded as to retain the water 
flowing upon them from roads or steep declivities, and six where the 
earth is kept constantly moist by infiltration from running brooks.— 
Comptes Rendus d VAcademie des Sciences —t. xix, Juillet, Dec., 1844, 
p. 167. 

The effect of accidental irrigation is well shown in the growth of the 
trees planted along the canals of irrigation which traverse the fields in 
many parts of Italy. They flourish most luxuriantly, in spite of continual 
lopping, and yield a very important contribution to the stock of fuel for 
domestic use; while trees, situated so far from canals as to be out of the 
reach of infiltration from them, are of much slower growth, under circum¬ 
stances otherwise equally favorable. 

In other experiments of Chevandier, under better conditions, the yield 
of wood was increased, by judicious irrigation, in the ratio of seven to one, 
the profits in that of twelve to one. At the Exposition of 1855, Chambre- 
lent exhibited young trees, which, in four years from the seed, had grown 
to the height of sixteen and twenty feet, and the diameter of ten and 
twelve inches. Chevandier experimented with various manures, and 
found that some of them might be profitably applied to young, but not 
to old trees, the quantity required in the latter case being too great. 
Wood ashes and the refuse of soda factories are particularly recommended. 
I have seen an extraordinary growth produced in fir trees by the applica¬ 
tion of soapsuds. 


PROTECTION AGAINST ANIMALS. 


321 


they would take place in different zones, it would afford indefi¬ 
nitely an annual crop of firewood and timber. 

The duties of the forester do not end here. It sometimes 
happens that the glades left by felling the older trees are not 
sufficiently seeded, or that the species, or essences , as the 
French oddly call them, are not duly proportioned in the new 
crop. In this case, seed must be artificially sown, or young 
trees planted in the vacancies. 

One of the most important rules in the administration of 
the forest is the absolute exclusion of domestic quadrupeds 
from every wood which is not destined to be cleared. ISTo 
growth of young trees is possible where cattle are admitted to 
pasture at any season of the year, though they are undoubt¬ 
edly most destructive while trees are in leaf.* 

* Although the economy of the forest has received little attention in 
the United States, no lover of American nature can have failed to observe 
a marked difference between a native wood from which cattle are excluded 
and one where they are permitted to browse. A few seasons suffice for 
the total extirpation of the “ underbrush,” including the young trees on 
which alone the reproduction of the forest depends, and all the branches 
of those of larger growth which hang within reach of the cattle are 
stripped of their buds and leaves, and soon wither and fall off. These 
effects are observable at a great distance, and a wood pasture is recognized, 
almost as far as it can be seen, by the regularity with which its lower 
foliage terminates at what Ruskin somewhere calls the “cattle line.” This 
always runs parallel to the surface of the ground, and is determined by the 
height to which domestic quadrupeds can reach to feed upon the leaves. 
In describing a visit to the grand-ducal farm of San Rossore near Pisa, 
where a large herd of camels is kept, Chateauvieux says: “ In passing 
through a wood of evergreen oaks, I observed that all the twigs and 
foliage of the trees were clipped up to the height of about twelve feet 
above the ground, without leaving a single spray below that level. I was 
informed that the browsing of the camels had trimmed the trees as high 
as they could reach.”— Lullin de Chateauvieux, Lettres sur Vltalie , p. 113. 

The removal of the shelter afforded by the brushwood and the pendu¬ 
lous branches of trees permits drying and chilling winds to parch and cool 
the ground, and of course injuriously affects the growth of the wood. But 
this is not all. The tread of quadrupeds exposes and bruises the roots of 
the trees, which often die from this cause, as any one may observe by fol¬ 
lowing the paths made by cattle through woodlands. 

21 


322 


REMOVAL OF LEAVES. 


It is often necessary to take measures for the protection of 
young trees against the rabbit, the mole, and other rodent 
quadrupeds, and of older ones against the damage done by the 
larvae of insects hatched upon the surface or in the tissues ot 
the bark, or even in the wood itself. The much greater lia¬ 
bility of the artificial than of the natural forest to injury from 
this cause is perhaps the only point in which the superiority 
of the former to the latter is not as marked as that of any 
domesticated vegetable to its wild representative. But the 
better quality of the wood and the much more rapid growth 
of the trained and regulated forest are abundant compensa¬ 
tions for the loss thus occasioned, and the progress of entomo¬ 
logical science will, perhaps, suggest new methods of prevent¬ 
ing the ravages of insects. Thus far, however, the collection 
and destruction of the eggs, by simple but expensive means, 
has proved the only effectual remedy.* 

It is common in Europe to permit the removal of the fallen 
leaves and fragments of bark and branches with which the 
forest soil is covered, and sometimes the cutting of the lower 

* I have remarked elsewhere that most insects which deposit and hatch 
their eggs in the wood of the natural forest confine themselves to dead 
trees. Not only is this the fact, hut it is also true that many of the borers 
attack only freshly cut timber. Their season of labor is a short one, and 
unless the tree is cut during this period, it is safe from them. In summer 
you may hear them plying their augers in the wood of a young pine with 
soft green bark, as you sit upon its trunk, within a "week after it has been 
felled, but the windfalls of the winter lie uninjured by the worm and even 
undecayed for centuries. In the pine woods of New England, after the 
regular lumberman has removed the standing trees, these old trunks are 
hauled out from the mosses and leaves which half cover them, and often 
furnish excellent timber. The slow decay of such timber in the woods, it 
may be remarked, furnishes another proof of the uniformity of temper¬ 
ature and humidity in the forest, for the trunk of a tree lying on grass or 
plough land, and of course exposed to all the alternations of climate, hardly 
resists complete decomposition for a generation. The forests of Europe 
exhibit similar facts. Wessely, in a description of the primitive wmod of 
Neuwald in Lower Austria, says that the windfalls required from 150 to 
200 years for entire decay .—Die OesterreicMschen Alpenlander und Hire 
Forste, p. 312. 


REMOVAL OF LEAVES. 


323 


twigs of evergreens. Tlie leaves and twigs are principally 
used as litter for cattle, and finally as manure, the bark and 
wind-fallen branches as fuel. By long usage, sometimes by 
express grant, this privilege has become a vested right of the 
population in the neighborhood of many public, and even 
large private forests ; but it is generally regarded as a serious 
evil. To remove the leaves and fallen twigs is to withdraw 
much of the pabulum upon which the tree was destined to 
feed. The small branches and leaves are the parts of the tree 
which yield the largest proportion of ashes on combustion, and 
of course they supply a great amount of nutriment for the 
young shoots. u A cubic foot of twigs,” says Yaupell, “ yields 
four times as much ashes as a cubic foot of stem wood. * * 

For every hundred weight of dried leaves carried off from a 
beech forest, we sacrifice a hundred and sixty cubic feet of 
wood. The leaves and the mosses are a substitute, not only 
for manure, but for ploughing. The carbonic acid given out 
by decaying leaves, when taken up by water, serves to dissolve 
the mineral constituents of the soil, and is particularly active 
in disintegrating feldspar and the clay derived from its decom¬ 
position. * * * The leaves belong to the soil. Without 

them it cannot preserve its fertility, and cannot furnish nutri¬ 
ment to the beech. The trees languish, produce seed inca¬ 
pable of germination, and the spontaneous self-sowing, which 
is an indispensable element in the best systems of sylviculture, 
fails altogether in the bared and impoverished soil.” * 

* Yaupell, Bogens Indvandring i de JDansJce Shove, pp. 29, 46. Yaupell 
further observes, on the page last quoted : “ The removal of leaves is in¬ 
jurious to the forest, not only because it retards the growth of trees, but 
still more because it disqualifies the soil for the production of particular 
species. When the beech languishes, and the development of its branches 
is less vigorous and its crown less spreading, it becomes unable to resist 
the encroachments of the fir. This latter tree thrives in an inferior soil, 
and being no longer stifled by the thick foliage of the beech, it spreads 
gradually through the wood, while the beech retreats before it and finally 
perishes.” 

The study of the natural order of succession in forest trees is of the 
utmost importance in sylviculture, because it guides us in the selection of 


324 


LOPPING AND TRIMMING. 


Besides these evils, the removal of the leaves deprives the 
soil of that spongy character which gives it such immense 
value as a reservoir of moisture and a regulator of the flow of 
springs; and, finally, it exposes the surface roots to the drying 
influence of sun and wind, to accidental mechanical injury 
from the tread of animals or men, and, in cold climates, to the 
destructive effects of frost. 

The annual lopping and trimming of trees for fuel, so com¬ 
mon in Europe, is fatal to the higher uses of the forest, but 
where small groves are made, or rows of trees planted, for no 
other purpose than to secure a supply of firewood, or to serve 

the species to be employed in planting a new or restoring a decayed forest. 
When ground is laid bare both of trees and of vegetable mould, and left 
to the action of unaided and unobstructed nature, she first propagates trees 
which germinate and grow only under the influence of a full supply of 
light and air, and then, in succession, other species, according to their 
ability to bear the shade and their demand for more abundant nutriment. 
In Northern Europe, the larch, the white birch, the aspen, first appear; 
then follow the maple, the alder, the ash, the fir; then the oak and the 
linden; and then the beech. The trees called by these respective names 
in the United States are not specifically the same as their European name¬ 
sakes, nor are they always even the equivalents of these latter, and there¬ 
fore the order of succession in America would not be precisely as indicated 
by the foregoing list, but it nevertheless very nearly corresponds to it. 

It is thought important to encourage the growth of the beech in Den¬ 
mark and Northern Germany, because it upon the whole yields better 
returns than other trees, and particularly because it appears not to 
exhaust, but on the contrary to enrich the soil; for by shedding its leaves 
it returns to it most of the nutriment it has drawn from it, and at the same 
time furnishes a solvent which aids materially in the decomposition of its 
mineral constituents. 

When the forest is left to itself, the order of succession is constant, and 
its occasional inversion is always explicable by some human interference. 
It is curious that the trees which require most light are content with the 
poorest soils, and vice versa. The trees which first appear are also those 
which propagate themselves farthest to the north. The birch, the larch, 
and the fir bear a severer climate than the oak, the oak than the beech. 
“ These parallelisms,” says Vaupell, “ are very interesting, because they 
are entirely independent of each other,” and each prescribes the same 
order of succession .—Bogens Indvandring , p. 42. 


CATTLE AND THE FOREST. 


325 


as supports for the vine, it is often very advantageous. The 
willows, and many other trees, bear polling for a long series 
of years without apparent diminution of growth of branches, 
and though certainly a polled, or, to use an old English word, 
a doddered tree, is in general a melancholy object, yet it must 
be admitted that the aspect of some species—the American 
locust, Robinia pseudacacia , for instance—when young, is 
improved by this process.* 

I have spoken of the needs of agriculture as a principal 
cause of the destruction of the forest, and of domestic cattle as 
particularly injurious to the growth of young trees. But these 
animals affect the forest, indirectly, in a still more important 
way, because the extent of cleared ground required for agri¬ 
cultural use depends very much on the number and kinds of 
the cattle bred. We have seen, in a former chapter, that, in 
the United States, the domestic quadrupeds amount to more 
than a hundred millions, or three times the number of the 
human population of the Union. In many of the Western 
States, the swine subsist more or less on acorns, nuts, and 
other products of the woods, and the prairies, or natural mead¬ 
ows of the Mississippi valley, yield a large amount of food for 
beast, as well as for man. With these exceptions, all this vast 
army of quadrupeds is fed wholly on grass, grain, pulse, and 
roots grown on soil reclaimed from the forest by European 
settlers. It is true that the flesh of domestic quadrupeds 
enters very largely into the aliment of the American people, 
and greatly reduces the quantity of vegetable nutriment which 
they would otherwise consume, so that a smaller amount of 
agricultural product is required for immediate human food, 
and, of course, a smaller extent of cleared land is needed for 
the growth of that product, than if no domestic animals ex¬ 
isted. But the flesh of the horse, the ass, and the mule is not 

* When vigorous young locusts, of two or three inches in diameter, are 
polled, they throw out a great number of very thick-leaved shoots, which 
arrange themselves in a globular head, so unlike the natural crown of the 
acacia, that persons familiar only with the untrained tree often take them 
for a different species. 


326 


CATTLE AND THE FOREST. 


consumed by man, and the sheep is reared rather for its fleece 
than for food. Besides this, the ground required to produce 
the grass and grain consumed in rearing and fattening a graz¬ 
ing quadruped, would yield a far larger amount of nutriment, 
if devoted to the growing of breadstuffs, than is furnished by 
his flesh; and, upon the whole, whatever advantages may be 
reaped from the breeding of domestic cattle, it is plain that 
the cleared land devoted to their sustenance in the originally 
wooded part of the United States, after deducting a quantity 
sufficient to produce an amount of aliment equal to their flesh, 
still greatly exceeds that cultivated for vegetables, directly 
consumed by the people of the same regions ; or, to express a 
nearly equivalent idea in other words, the meadow and the 
pasture, taken together, much exceed the plough land.* 

In fertile countries, like the United States, the foreign 
demand for animal and vegetable aliment, for cotton, and for 
tobacco, much enlarges the sphere of agricultural operations, 
and, of course, prompts further encroachments upon the forest. 
The commerce in these articles, therefore, constitutes in Amer¬ 
ica a special cause of the destruction of the woods, which does 
not exist in the numerous states of the Old World that derive 
the raw material of their mechanical industry from distant 
lands, and import many articles of vegetable food or luxury 
which their own climates cannot advantageously produce. 

* The two ideas expressed in the text are not exactly equivalent, 
because, though the consumption of animal food diminishes the amount of 
vegetable aliment required for human use, yet the animals themselves con¬ 
sume a great quantity of grain and roots grown on ground ploughed and 
cultivated as regularly and as laboriously as any other. 

The 170,000,000 bushels of oats raised in the United States in 1860, 
and fed to the 6,000,000 horses, the potatoes, the turnips, and the maize 
employed in fattening the oxen, the sheep, and the swine slaughtered 
the same year, occupied an extent of ground which, cultivated by hand 
labor and with Chinese industry and skill, would probably have produced 
a quantity of vegetable food equal in alimentary power to the flesh of the 
quadrupeds killed for domestic use. Hence, so far as the naked question of 
amount of aliment is concerned, the meadows and the pastures might as 
well have remained in the forest condition. 


DUTY OF PRESERVING TIIE FOREST. 


327 


The growth of arboreal vegetation is so slow that, though 
he who buries an acorn may hope to see it shoot up to a min¬ 
iature resemblance of the majestic tree w T hicli shall shade his 
remote descendants, yet the longest life hardly embraces the 
seedtime and the harvest of a forest. The planter of a wood 
must be actuated by higher motives than those of an invest¬ 
ment the profits of which consist in direct pecuniary gain to 
himself or even to his posterity; for if, in rare cases, an arti¬ 
ficial forest may, in two or three generations, more than repay 
its original cost, still, in general, the value of its timber will not 
return the capital expended and the interest accrued.* But 
when we consider the immense collateral advantages derived 
from the presence, the terrible evils necessarily resulting from 
the destruction of the forest, both the preservation of existing 
woods, and the far more costly extension of them where they 
have been unduly reduced, are among the most obvious of the 
duties which this age owes to those that are to come after it. 
Especially is this obligation incumbent upon Americans. No 
civilized people profits so largely from the toils and sacrifices 
of its immediate predecessors as they; no generations have 

* According to Clav6 (Etudes, p. 159), the net revenue from the forests 
of the state in France, making no allowance for interest on the capital 
represented by the forest, is two dollars per acre. In Saxony it is about 
the same, though the cost of administration is twice as much as in France; 
in Wiirtemberg it is about a dollar an acre ; and in Prussia, where half the 
income is consumed in the expenses of administration, it sinks to less than 
half a dollar. This low rate in Prussia is partly explained by the fact that 
a considerable proportion of the annual product of wood is either conceded 
to persons claiming prescriptive rights, or sold, at a very small price, to 
the poor. Taking into account the capital invested in forest land, and 
adding interest upon it, Pressler calculates that a pine wood, managed with 
a view to felling it when eighty years old, would yield only one eighth of 
one per cent, annual profit; a fir wood, at one hundred years, one sixth of 
one per cent.; a beech wood, at one hundred and twenty years, one fourth 
of one per cent. The same author (p. 335) gives the net income of the 
FTew forest in England, over and above expenses, interest not computed, at 
twenty-five cents per acre only. In America, where no expense is be¬ 
stowed upon the woods, the annual growth would generally be estimated 
much higher. 


328 


INSTABILITY OF AM-KKICAN LIFE. 


ever sown so liberally, and, in their own persons, reaped so 
scanty a return, as the pioneers of Anglo-American social life. 
We can repay our debt to our noble forefathers only by a like 
magnanimity, by a like self-forgetting care for the moral and 
material interests of our own posterity. 

Instability of American Life. 

All human institutions, associate arrangements, modes of 
life, have their characteristic imperfections. The natural, per¬ 
haps the necessary defect of ours, is their instability, their 
want of fixedness, not in form only, but even in spirit. The 
face of physical nature in the United States shares this inces¬ 
sant fluctuation, and the landscape is as variable as the habits 
of the population. It is time for some abatement in the rest¬ 
less love of change which characterizes us, and makes us al¬ 
most a nomade rather than a sedentary people.* We have now 
felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. 
Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal 

* It is rare that a middle-aged American dies in the house where he 
was horn, or an old man even in that which he has built; and this is 
scarcely less true of the rural districts, where every man owns his habit¬ 
ation, than of the city, where the majority live in hired houses. This life 
of incessant flitting is unfavorable for the execution of permanent improve¬ 
ments of every sort, and especially of those which, like the forest, are 
slow in repaying any part of the capital expended in them. It requires a 
very generous spirit in a landholder to plant a wood on a farm he expects 
to sell, or which he knows will pass out of the hands of his descendants 
at his death. But the very fact of having begun a plantation would attach 
the proprietor more strongly to the soil for which he had made such a 
sacrifice; and the paternal acres would have a greater value in the eyes of 
a succeeding generation, if thus improved and beautified by the labors of 
those from whom they were inherited. Landed property, therefore, the 
transfer of which is happily free from every legal impediment or restric¬ 
tion in the United States, would find, in the feelings thus prompted, a 
moral check against a too frequent change of owners, and would tend to 
remain long enough in one proprietor or one family to admit of gradual 
improvements which would increase its value both to the possessor and to 
the state. 


INSTABILITY OF AMERICAN LIFE. 


329 


proportions, and devise means for maintaining tlie permanence 
of its relations to the fields, the meadows, and the pastures, to 
the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets 
with which it waters the earth. The establishment of an ap¬ 
proximately fixed ratio between the two most broadly charac¬ 
terized distinctions of rural surface—woodland and plough land 
—would involve a certain persistence of character in all the 
branches of industry, all the occupations and habits of life, 
which depend upon or are immediately connected with either, 
without implying a rigidity that should exclude flexibility of 
accommodation to the many changes of external circumstance 
which human wisdom can neither prevent nor foresee, and 
would thus help us to become, more emphatically, a well- 
ordered and stable commonwealth, and, not less conspicuously, 
a people of progress. 

Note on word watershed , omitted on p. 257.—Sir John F. W. Herschel 
{Physical Geography, 137, and elsewhere) spells this word water-sched, be¬ 
cause he considers it a translation, or rather an adoption of the German 
a Wasser-scheide, separation of the waters, not water -shed, the slope down 
which the waters run.” As a point of historical etymology, it is probable 
that the word in question was suggested to those who first used it by the 
German Wasserscheide ; hut the spelling water-sched , proposed by Herschel, 
is objectionable, both because sch is a combination of letters wholly un¬ 
known to modern English orthography and properly representing no sound 
recognized in English orthoepy, and for the still better reason that water¬ 
shed, in the sense of division-of-the-waters, has a legitimate English ety¬ 
mology. 

The Anglo-Saxon sceadan meant both to separate or divide, and to shade 
or shelter. It is the root of the English verbs to shed and to shade, and in 
the former meaning is the A. S. equivalent of the German verb scheiden. 

Shed in Old English had the meaning to separate or distinguish. It is 
so used in the Owl and the Nightingale , v. 197. Palsgrave {Les clarcisse- 
ment, etc., p. 717) defines I shede, I departe thinges asonder; and the word 
still means to divide in several English local dialects. Hence, watershed, 
the division or separation of the waters, is good English both in sense and 
spelling. 


CHAPTER IV. 


THE WATERS. 

LAND ARTIFICIALLY WON FROM THE WATERS : «, EXCLUSION OF THE SEA BY 
DIKING ; b , DRAINING OF LAKES AND MARSHES ; C, GEOGRAPHICAL INFLU¬ 
ENCE OF SUCH OPERATIONS-LOWERING OF LAKES-MOUNTAIN LAKES—CLI¬ 

MATIC EFFECTS OF DRAINING LAKES AND MARSHES—GEOGRAPHICAL AND 

CLIMATIC EFFECTS OF AQUEDUCTS, RESERVOIRS, AND CANALS-SURFACE AND 

UNDERDRAINING, AND THEIR CLIMATIC AND GEOGRAPHICAL EFFECTS—IRRI¬ 
GATION AND ITS CLIMATIC AND GEOGRAPHICAL EFFECTS. 

INUNDATIONS AND TORRENTS : «, RIVER EMBANKMENTS ; 6, FLOODS OF 
THE ARDECHE ; C, CRUSHING FORCE OF TORRENTS ', d, INUNDATIONS OF 1856 

IN FRANCE ; e, REMEDIES AGAINST INUNDATIONS-CONSEQUENCES IF THE 

NILE HAD BEEN CONFINED BY LATERAL DIKES. 

IMPROVEMENTS IN THE VAL DI CHIANA—IMPROVEMENTS IN THE TUSCAN 
MAREMME—OBSTRUCTION OF RIVER MOUTHS—SUBTERRANEAN WATERS-AR¬ 

TESIAN WELLS—ARTIFICIAL SPRINGS—ECONOMIZING PRECIPITATION. 


Land artificially won from the Waters. 

Man, as we have seen, has done mnch to revolutionize the 
solid surface of the globe, and to change the distribution and 
proportions, if not the essential character, of the organisms 
which inhabit the land and even the waters. Besides the in¬ 
fluence thus exerted upon the life which peoples the sea, his 
action upon the land has involved a certain amount of indirect 
encroachment upon the territorial jurisdiction of the ocean. 
So far as he has increased the erosion of running waters by the 
destruction of the forest, he has promoted the deposit of solid 
matter in the sea, thus reducing its depth, advancing the coast 
line, and diminishing the area covered by the waters. He has 
gone beyond this, and invaded the realm of the ocean by con- 


NATURAL CHANGE OF COAST LINE. 


331 


strncting within its borders wharves, piers, lighthouses, break¬ 
waters, fortresses, and other facilities for his commercial and 
military operations; and in some countries he has permanently 
rescued from tidal overflow, and even from the very bed of 
the deep, tracts of ground extensive enough to constitute val¬ 
uable additions to his agricultural domain. The quantity of 
soil gained from the sea by these different modes of acquisition 
is, indeed, too inconsiderable to form an appreciable element 
in the comparison of the general proportion between the two 
great forms of terrestrial surface, land and water; but the 
results of such operations, considered in their physical and 
their moral bearings, are sufficiently important to entitle them 
to special notice in every comprehensive view of the relations 
between man and nature. 

There are cases, as on the western shores of the Baltic, 
where, in consequence of the secular elevation of the coast, the 
sea appears to be retiring ; others, where, from the slow sink¬ 
ing of the land, it seems to be advancing. These movements 
depend upon geological causes wholly out of our reach, and 
man can neither advance nor retard them. There are also 
cases where similar apparent effects are produced by local 
oceanic currents, by river deposit or erosion, by tidal action, or 
by the influence of the wind upon the waves and the sands of 
the sea beach. A regular current may drift suspended earth 
and seaweed along a coast until they are caught by an eddy 
and finally deposited out of the reach of farther disturbance, 
or it may scoop out the bed of the sea and undermine promon¬ 
tories and headlands; a powerful river, as the wind changes 
the direction of its flow at its outlet, may wash away shores 
and sandbanks at one point to deposit their material at an¬ 
other ; the tide or waves, stirred to unusual depths by the 
wind, may gradually wear down the line of coast, or they 
may form shoals and coast dunes by depositing the sand they 
have rolled up from the bottom of the ocean. These latter 
modes of action are slow in producing effects sufficiently im¬ 
portant to be noticed in general geography, or even to be 
visible in the representations of coast line laid down in ordi- 


332 


HARBOR AND COAST IMPROVEMENTS. 


nary maps ; but they nevertheless form conspicuous features 
in local topography, and they are attended with consequences 
of great moment to the material and the moral interests of 
men. 

The forces which produce these results are all in a consid¬ 
erable degree subject to control, or rather to direction and 
resistance, by human power, and it is in guiding and combat¬ 
ing them that man has achieved some of his most remarkable 
and honorable conquests over nature. The triumphs in ques¬ 
tion, or what we generally call harbor and coast improve¬ 
ments, whether we estimate their value by the money and 
labor expended upon them, or by their bearing upon the inter¬ 
ests of commerce and the arts of civilization, must take a very 
high rank among the great works of man, and they are fast 
assuming a magnitude greatly exceeding their former relative 
importance. The extension of commerce and of the military 
marine, and especially the introduction of vessels of increased 
burden and deeper draught of water, have imposed upon en¬ 
gineers tasks of a character which a century ago would have 
been pronounced, and, in fact, would have been impracticable ; 
but necessity has stimulated an ingenuity which has contrived 
means of executing them, and which gives promise of yet 
greater performance in time to come. 

Men have ceased to admire the power which heaped up the 
great pyramid to gratify the pride of a despot with a giant 
sepulchre; for many great harbors, many important lines of 
internal communication, in the civilized world, now exhibit 
works which surpass the vastest remains of ancient architec¬ 
tural art in mass and weight of matter, demand the exercise 
of far greater constructive skill, and involve a much heavier 
pecuniary expenditure than would now be required for the 
building of the tomb of Cheops. It is computed that the great 
pyramid, the solid contents of which when complete were about 
3,000,000 cubic yards, could be erected for a million of pounds 
sterling. The breakwater at Cherbourg, founded in rough water 
sixty feet deep, at an average distance of more than two miles 
from the shore, contains double the mass of the pyramid, and 


COAST DIKES. 


333 


many a comparatively unimportant railroad has been con¬ 
structed at twice the cost which would now build that stupen¬ 
dous monument. Indeed, although man, detached from the 
solid earth, is almost powerless to struggle against the sea, he 
is fast becoming invincible by it so long as his foot is planted 
on the shore, or even on the bottom of the rolling ocean ; and 
though on some battle fields between the waters and the land, 
he is obliged slowly to yield his ground, yet he retreats still 
facing the foe, and will finally be able to say to the sea: 
“ Thus far shalt thou come and no farther, and here shall thy 
proud w r aves be stayed ! ” 

The description of works of harbor and coast improvement 
which have only an economical value, not a true geographical 
importance, does not come within the plan of the present 
volume, and in treating this branch of my subject, I shall 
confine myself to such as are designed either to gain new soil 
by excluding the waters from grounds which they had perma¬ 
nently or occasionally covered, or to resist new encroachments 
of the sea upon the land. 

a. Exclusion of the Sea by Diking. 

The draining of the Lincolnshire fens in England, which 
converted about 400,000 acres of marsh, pool, and tide-washed 
flat into plough land and pasturage, is a work, or rather series 
of works, of great magnitude, and it possesses much econom¬ 
ical, and, indeed, no trifling geographical importance. Its 
plans and methods were, at least in part, borrowed from the 
example of like improvements in Holland, and it is, in diffi¬ 
culty and extent, inferior to works executed for the same pur¬ 
pose on the opposite coast of the North Sea, by Dutch, Erisic, 
and Low German engineers. The space I can devote to such 
operations will be better employed in describing the latter, 
and I content myself with the simple statement I have already 
made of the quantity of worthless and even pestilential land 
which has been rendered both productive and salubrious in 
Lincolnshire, by diking out the sea, and the rivers which trav¬ 
erse the fens of that country. 


334 


INUNDATIONS IN THE NETHERLANDS. 


The almost continued prevalence of west winds npon both 
coasts of the German Ocean occasions a constant set of the 
currents of that sea to the east, and both for this reason and 
on account of the greater violence of storms from the former 
quarter, the English shores are much less exposed to invasion 
by the waves than those of the Netherlands and the provinces 
contiguous to them on the north. The old Netherlandish 
chronicles are filled with the most startling accounts of the 
damage done by the irruptions of the ocean, from west winds 
or extraordinarily high tides, at times long before any consid¬ 
erable extent of seacoast was diked. Several hundreds of these 
terrible inundations are recorded, and in very many of them 
the loss of human lives is estimated as high as one hundred 
thousand. It is impossible to doubt that there must be enor¬ 
mous exaggeration in these numbers; for, with all the reckless 
hardihood shown by men in braving the dangers and priva¬ 
tions attached by nature to their birthplace, it is inconceivable 
that so dense a population as such wholesale destruction of life 
supposes could find the means of subsistence, or content itself 
to dwell, on a territory liable, a dozen times in a century, to 
such fearful devastation. There can be no doubt, however, 
that the low continental shores of the German Ocean very fre¬ 
quently suffered immense injury from inundation by the sea, 
and it is natural, therefore, that the various arts of resistance 
to the encroachments of the ocean, and, finally, of aggressive 
warfare upon its domain, and of permanent conquest of its 
territory, should have been earlier studied and carried to 
higher perfection in the latter countries, than in England, 
which had much less to lose or to gain by the incursions or the 
retreat of the waters. 

Indeed, although the confinement of swelling rivers by 
artificial embankments is of great antiquity, 1 do not know 
that the defence or acquisition of land from the sea by diking 
was ever practised on a large scale until systematically under¬ 
taken by the Netherlander, a few centuries after the com¬ 
mencement of the Christian era. The silence of the Koman 
historians affords a strong presumption that this art was un- 


DIKES OF THE NETHERLANDS. 


335 


known to the inhabitants of the Netherlands at the time of the 
Koman invasion, and the elder Pliny’s description of the mode 
of life along the coast which has now been long diked in, 
applies precisely to the habits of the people who live on the 
low islands and mainland flats lying outside of the chain of 
dikes, and wholly unprotected by embankments of any sort. 

It has been conjectured, and not without probability, that 
the causeways built by the Romans across the marshes of the 
Low Countries, in their campaigns against the Germanic tribes, 
gave the natives the first hint of the utility which might be 
derived from similar constructions applied to a different pur¬ 
pose.* If this is so, it is one of the most interesting among 
the many instances in which the arts and enginery of war have 
been so modified as to be eminently promotive of the blessings 
of peace, thereby in some measure compensating the wrongs 
and sufferings they have inflicted on humanity, f The Low- 

* It has been often asserted by eminent writers that a part of the fens 
in Lincolnshire was reclaimed by sea dikes under the government of the 
Romans. I have found no ancient authority in support of this allegation, 
nor can I refer to any passage in Roman literature in which sea dikes are 
expressly mentioned otherwise than as walls or piers, except that in Pliny 
(Hist. Hat. xxxvi, 24), where it is said that the Tyrrhenian sea was excluded 
from the Lucrine lake by dikes. 

t A friend has recently suggested to me an interesting illustration of 
the applicability of military instrumentalities to pacific art. The sale of 
gunpowder in the United States, he informs me, is smaller since the com¬ 
mencement of the present rebellion than before, because the war has 
caused the suspension of many public and private improvements, in the 
execution of which great quantities of powder were used for blasting. 

It is alleged that the same observation was made in France during the 
Oriinean war, and that, in general, not ten per cent, of the powder manu¬ 
factured on either side of the Atlantic is employed for military purposes. 

It is a fact not creditable to the moral sense of modern civilization, that 
very many of the most important improvements in machinery and the 
working of metals have originated in the necessities of war, and that 
man’s highest ingenuity has been shown, and many of his most remarkable 
triumphs over natural forces achieved, in the contrivance of engines for 
the destruction of his fellow man. The military material employed by the 
first Napoleon has become, in less than two generations, nearly as obsolete 
as the sling and stone of the shepherd, and attack and defence now begin 


336 


LAND GAINED BY DIKING. 


landers are believed to have secured some coast and bay islands 
by ring dikes, and to have embanked some fresh water chan¬ 
nels, as early as the eighth or ninth century; but it does not 
appear that sea dikes, important enough to be noticed in histor¬ 
ical records, were constructed on the mainland before the thir¬ 
teenth century. The practice of draining inland accumulation 
of w’ater, whether fresh or salt, for the purpose of bringing 
under cultivation the ground they cover, is of later origin, and 
is said not to have been adopted until after the middle of the 
fifteenth century.* 

The total amount of surface gained to the agriculture of 
the Netherlands by diking out the sea and by draining shallow 
bays and lakes, is estimated by Staring at three hundred and 
fifty-five thousand bunder or hectares, equal to eight hundred 
and seventy-seven thousand two hundred and forty acres, 
which is one tenth of the area of the kingdom.f In very many 
instances, the dikes have been partially, in some particularly 
exposed localities totally destroyed by the violence of the sea, 
and the drained lands again flooded. In some cases, the soil 
thus painfully won from the ocean has been entirely lost; in 
others it has been recovered by repairing or rebuilding the 
dikes and pumping out the water. Besides this, the weight 

at distances to which, half a century ago, military reconnoissances hardly 
extended. Upon a partial view of the subject, the human race seems des¬ 
tined to become its own executioner—on the one hand, exhausting the ca¬ 
pacity of the earth to furnish sustenance to her taskmaster; on the other, 
compensating diminished production by inventing more efficient methods 
of exterminating the consumer. 

But war develops great civil virtues, and brings into action a degree 
and kind of physical energy which seldom fails to awaken a new intellect¬ 
ual life in a people that achieves great moral and political results through 
great heroism and endurance and perseverance. Domestic corruption has 
destroyed more nations than foreign invasion, and a people is rarely con¬ 
quered till it has deserved subjugation. 

* Staring, Voormaals en Thans , p. 150. 

t Idem, p. 163. Much the largest proportion of the lands so reclaimed, 
though for the most part lying above low-water tidemark, are at a lower 
level than the Lincolnshire fens, and more subject to inundation from the 
irruptions of the sea. 


LOSS OF LAND IN THE NETHERLANDS. 


337 


of the dikes gradually sinks them into the soft soil beneath, 
and this loss of elevation must be compensated by raising the 
surface, while the increased burden thus added tends to sink 
them still lower. “Tetens declares,” says Kohl, “that in some 
places the dikes have gradually sunk to the depth of sixty or 
even a hundred feet.” * For these reasons, the processes of 
dike building have been almost everywhere again and again 
repeated, and thus the total expenditure of money and of labor 
upon the works in question is much greater than would appear 
from an estimate of the actual cost of diking-in a given extent 
of coast land and draining a given area of water surface.f 

On the other hand, by erosion of the coast line, the drifting 
of sand dunes into the interior, and the drowning of fens and 
morasses by incursions of the sea—all caused, or at least 
greatly aggravated, by human improvidence—the Netherlands 
have lost a far larger area of land since the commencement of 
the Christian era than they have gained by diking and drain¬ 
ing. Staring despairs of the possibility of calculating the loss 
from the first-mentioned two causes of destruction, but he esti- 

* Die Inseln und Marschen der Herzogthumer Schlesicig und Holstein , 

iii, p. 151. 

t The purely agricultural island of Pelworm, off the coast of Schleswig, 
containing about 10,000 acres, annually expends for the maintenance of its 
dikes not less than £6,000 sterling, or nearly $30,000.—J. G. Koijl, Inseln 
und Marschen Schleswig''s, und Holstein's , ii, p. 394. 

The original cost of the dikes of Pelworm is not stated. 

“ The greatest part of the province of Zeeland is protected by dikes 
measuring 250 miles in length, the maintenance of which costs, in ordinary 
years, more than a million guilders [above $400,000]. * * * The an¬ 

nual expenditure for dikes and hydraulic works in Holland is from five to 
seven million guilders” [$2,000,000 to $2,800,000].— Wild, Die Nieder- 
lande , i, p. 62. 

One is not sorry to learn that the Spanish tyranny in the Netherlands 
had some compensations. The great chain of ring dikes which surrounds 
a large part of Zeeland is due to the energy of Caspar de Robles, the 
Spanish governor of that province, who in 1570 ordered the construction 
of these works at the public expense, as a substitute for the private em¬ 
bankments which had previously partially served the same purpose.— Wild, 
Die Niederlande, i, p. 62. 

22 


338 CHARACTER OF GROUNDS DIKED IN. 

mates that not less than six hundred and forty thousand bun¬ 
der, or one million live hundred and eighty-one thousand 
acres, of fen and marsh have been washed away, or rather 
deprived of their vegetable surface and covered by water, and 
thirty-seven thousand bunder, or ninety-one thousand four 
hundred acres of recovered land, have been lost by the destruc¬ 
tion of the dikes which protected them.* The average value 
of land gained from the sea is estimated at about nineteen 
pounds sterling, or ninety dollars, per acre; while the lost 
fen and morass was not worth more than one twenty-fifth 
part of the same price. The ground buried by the drifting of 
the dunes appears to have been almost entirely of this latter 
character, and, upon the whole, there is no doubt that the soil 
added by human industry to the territory of the Netherlands, 
within the historical period, greatly exceeds in pecuniary value 
that which has fallen a prey to the waves during the same era. 

Upon most low and shelving coasts, like those of the Neth¬ 
erlands, the maritime currents are constantly changing, in 
consequence of the variability of the winds, and the shifting 
of the sandbanks, which the currents themselves now form and 
now displace. While, therefore, at one point the sea is ad¬ 
vancing landward, and requiring great effort to prevent the 
undermining and washing away of the dikes, it is shoaling at 
another by its own deposits, and exposing, at low water, a 
gradually widening belt of sands and ooze. The coast lands 
selected for diking-in are always at points where the sea is 
depositing productive soil. The Eider, the Elbe, the Weser, 
the Ems, the Rhine, the Maas, and the Schelde bring down 
large quantities of line earth. The prevalence of west winds 
prevents the waters from carrying this material far out from 
the coast, and it is at last deposited northward or southward 
from the mouth of the rivers which contribute it, accordinsr to 
the varying drift of the currents. 

The process of natural deposit which prepares the coast for 
diking-in is thus described by Staring: “ All sea-deposited soil 


* Staeing, Voormaah en Thans , p. 1G3. 


ISLANDS ENLARGED BY DIKING. 


339 


is composed of the same constituents. First comes a stratum 
of sand, with marine shells, or the shells of mollusks living in 
brackish water. If there he tides, and, of course, flowing and 
ebbing currents, mud is let fall upon the sand only after the 
latter has been raised above low-water mark ; for then only, 
at the change from flood to ebb, is the water still enough to 
form a deposit of so light a material. Where mud is found at 
greater depths, as, for example, in a large proportion of the Ij, 
it is a proof that at this point there was never any consid¬ 
erable tidal flow or other current. * * * The powerful 

tidal currents, flowing and ebbing twice a day, drift sand with 
them. They scoop out the bottom at one point, raise it at 
another, and the sandbanks in the current are continually 
shifting. As soon as a bank raises itself above low-water 
mark, flags and reeds establish themselves upon it. The me¬ 
chanical resistance of these plants checks the retreat of the 
high water and favors the deposit of the earth suspended in it, 
and the formation of land goes on with surprising rapidity. 
When it has risen to high-water level, it is soon covered with 
grasses, and becomes what is called schor in Zeeland, kwelder 
in Friesland. Such grounds are the foundation or starting 
point of the process of diking. When they are once elevated 
to the flood-tide level, no more mud is deposited upon them 
except by extraordinary high tides. Their further rise is, 
accordingly, very slow, and it is seldom advantageous to delay 
longer the operation of diking.” * 

The formation of new banks by the sea is constantly going 
on at points favorable for the deposit of sand and earth, and 
hence opportunity is continually afforded for enclosure of new 
land outside of that already diked in, the coast is fast advanc¬ 
ing seaward, and every new embankment increases the se¬ 
curity of former enclosures. The province of Zeeland consists 
of islands washed by the sea on their western coasts, and sep¬ 
arated by the many channels through which the Schelde and 
some other rivers find their way to the ocean. In the twelfth 


* Voormaals en Thans , pp. 150, 151. 


340 


ORIGIN OF THE NETHERLAND DIKES. 


century these islands were much smaller and more numerous 
than at present. They have been gradually enlarged, and, in 
several instances, at last connected by the extension of their 
system of dikes. Walcheren is formed of ten islets united into 
one about the end of the fourteenth century. At the middle 
of the fifteenth century, Goeree and Overflakkee consisted of 
separate islands, containing altogether about ten thousand 
acres; by means of above sixty successive advances of the 
dikes, they have been brought to compose a single island, 
whose area is not less than sixty thousand acres.'* 

In the Netherlands—which the first Napoleon character¬ 
ized as a deposit of the Rhine, and as, therefore, by natural 
law, rightfully the property of him who controlled the sources 
of that great river—and on the adjacent Frisic, Low German 
and Danish shores and islands, sea and river dikes have been 
constructed on a grander and more imposing scale than in any 
other country. The whole economy of the art has been there 
most thoroughly studied, and the literature of the subject is 
very extensive. For my present aim, which is concerned with 
results rather than with processes, it is not worth while to refer 
to professional treatises, and I shall content myself with pre¬ 
senting such information as-can be gathered from works of a 
more popular character.f 

The superior strata of the lowlands upon and near the 
coast are, as we have seen, principally composed of soil 

* Staring, Voormaals en Thans, p. 152. Kohl states that the peninsula 
of Diksand on the coast of Holstein consisted, at the close of the last cen¬ 
tury, of several islands measuring together less than five thousand acres. 
In 1837 they had been connected with the mainland, and had nearly 
doubled in area.— Tnseln u. Marschen Schlesio. Holst., iii, p. 262. 

f The most instructive and entertaining of tourists, J. G-. Kohl—so 
aptly characterized by Davies as the “ Herodotus of modern Europe ”— 
furnishes a great amount of interesting information on the dikes of the Low 
German seacoast, in his Inseln und Marschen der Herzogthumer Schleswig 
und Holstein. I am acquainted with no popular work on this subject 
which the reader can consult with greater profit. See also Staring, 
Voormaals en Thans , and De Bodem ran Nederland,, on the dikes of the 
Netherlands. 


CONSTRUCTION OF DIKES. 


341 


brought down by the great rivers I have mentioned, and 
either directly deposited by them upon the sands of the bot¬ 
tom, or carried out to sea by their currents, and then, after a 
shorter or longer exposure to the chemical and mechanical 
action of salt water and marine currents, restored again to the 
land by tidal overflow and subsidence from the waters in 
which it was suspended. At a very remote period, the coast 
flats were, at many points, raised so high by successive allu- 
vious or tidal deposits as to be above ordinary high water 
level, but they were still liable to occasional inundation from 
river floods, and from the sea water also, when heavy or long;- 
continued west winds drove it landward. The extraordinary 
fertility of this soil and its security as a retreat from hostile 
violence attracted to it a considerable population, while its 
want of protection against inundation exposed it to the devas¬ 
tations of which the chroniclers of the Middle Ages have left 
such highly colored pictures. The first permanent dwellings 
on the coast flats were erected upon artificial mounds, and 
many similar precarious habitations still exist on the unwalled 
islands and shores beyond the chain of dikes. River embank¬ 
ments, which, as is familiarly known, have from the earliest 
antiquity been employed in many countries where sea dikes 
are unknown, were probably the first works of this character 
constructed in the Low Countries, and when two neighboring 
streams of fresh water had been embanked, the next step in 
the process would naturally be to connect the river walls 
together by a transverse dike or raised causeway, which would 
serve to secure the intermediate ground both against the back¬ 
water of river floods and against overflow by the sea^ The 
oldest true sea dikes described in historical records, however, 
are those enclosing islands in the estuaries of the great rivers, 
and it is not impossible that the double character they possess 
as a security against maritime floods and as a military ram¬ 
part, led to their adoption upon those islands before similar 
constructions had been attempted upon the mainland. 

At some points of the coast, various contrivances, such as 
piers, piles, and, in fact, obstructions of all sorts to the ebb of 


342 


CONSTRUCTION OF DIKES. 


the current, are employed to facilitate the deposit of slime, 
before a regular enclosure is commenced. Usually, however, 
the first step is to build low and cheap embankments, extend¬ 
ing from an older dike, or from high ground, around the 
parcel of flat intended to be secured. These are called summer 
dikes ( sommer-deich , pi. sommer-deiche , German ; zomerkaai , 
zomerkade , pi. zoruerJcaaie, zomerhaden , Dutch). They are 
erected wdien a sufficient extent of ground to repay the cost 
has been elevated enough to he covered with coarse vegetation 
fit for pasturage. They serve both to secure the ground from 
overflow by the ordinary flood tides of mild weather, and to 
retain the slime deposited by very high water, which would 
otherwise be partly carried off by the retreating ebb. The 
elevation of the soil goes on slowly after this ; but when it has 
at last been sufficiently enriched, and raised high enough to 
justify the necessary outlay, permanent dikes are constructed 
by which the water is excluded at all seasons. These embank¬ 
ments are constructed of sand from the coast dunes or from 
sandbanks, and of earth from the mainland or from flats out¬ 
side the dikes, bound and strengthened by fascines, and pro¬ 
vided with sluices, which are generally founded on piles and 
of very expensive construction, for drainage at low water. 
The outward slope of the sea dikes is gentle, experience having 
shown that this form is least exposed to injury both from the 
waves and from floating ice, and the most modern dikes are 
even more moderate in the inclination of the seaward scarp 
than the older ones.* The crown of the dike, however, for the 
last three or four feet of its height, is much steeper, being 
intended rather as a protection against the spray than against 
the waves, and the inner slope is always comparatively abrupt. 

The height and thickness of dikes varies according to the 
elevation of the ground they enclose, the rise of the tides, the 
direction of the prevailing winds, and other special causes of 
exposure, but it may be said that they are, in general, raised 
from fifteen to twenty feet above ordinary liigli-w T ater mark. 

* The inclination varies from one foot rise in four of base to one foot 
in fourteen.— Kohl, iii, p. 210. 


EXTENSION OF DIKES. 


343 


The water slopes of river dikes are protected by plantations of 
willows or strong semi-aquatic shrubs or grasses, but as these 
will not grow upon banks exposed to salt water, sea dikes 
must be faced with stone, fascines, or some other revetement .* 
Upon the coast of Schleswig and Holstein, where the people 
have less capital at their command, they defend their embank¬ 
ments against ice and the waves by a coating of twisted straw 
or reeds, which must be renewed as often as once, sometimes 
twice a year. The inhabitants of these coasts call the chain of 
dikes u the golden border,” a name it well deserves, whether 
we suppose it to refer to its enormous cost, or, as is more 
probable, to its immense value as a protection to their fields 
and their firesides. 

When outlying flats are enclosed by building new embank¬ 
ments, the old interior dikes are suffered to remain, both as an 
additional security against the waves, and because the removal 
of them would be expensive. They serve, also, as roads, or 
causeways, a purpose for which the embankments nearest the 
sea are seldom employed, because the whole structure might 
be endangered from the breaking of the turf by wheels and 
the hoofs of horses. Where successive rows of dikes have been 

* The dikes are sometimes founded upon piles, and sometimes protected 
by one or more rows of piles driven deeply down into the bed of the sea 
in front of them. u Triple rows of piles of Scandinavian pine,” says Wild, 
“ have been driven down along the coast of Friesland, where there are no 
dune3, for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles. The piles are bound 
together by strong cross timbers and iron clamps, and the interstices filled 
with stones. The ground adjacent to the piling is secured with fascines, 
and at exposed points heavy blocks of stone are heaped up as an additional 
protection. The earth dike is built behind the mighty bulwark of this 
breakwater, and its foot also is fortified with stones.” * * * “ The 

great Helder dike is about five miles long and forty feet wide at the top, 
along which runs a good road. It slopes down two hundred feet into the 
sea, at an angle of forty degrees. The highest waves do not reach the 
summit, the lowest always cover its base. At certain distances, immense 
buttresses, of a height and width proportioned to those of the dike, and 
even more strongly built, run several hundred feet out into the rolling sea. 
This gigantic artificial coast is entirely composed of Norwegian granite.”—• 
Wild, Die Niederlande , i, pp. 61, 62. 


344 


SINKING OF THE SOIL. 


thus constructed, it is observed that the ground defended by 
the more ancient embankments is lower than that embraced 
within the newer enclosures, and this depression of level has 
been ascribed to a general subsidence of the coast from geo¬ 
logical causes ; but the better opinion seems to be that it is, in 
most cases, due merely to the consolidation and settling of the 
earth from being more effectually dried, from the weight of 
the dikes, from the tread of men and cattle, and from the 
movement of the heavy wagons which carry off the crops.* 

* The shaking of the ground, even when loaded with large buildings, 
by the passage of heavy carriages or artillery, or by the inarch of a body 
of cavalry or even infantry, shows that such causes may produce important 
mechanical elfects on the condition of the soil. The bogs in the Nether¬ 
lands, as in most other countries, contain large numbers of fallen trees, 
buried to a certain depth by earth and vegetable mould. When the bogs 
are dry enough to serve as pastures, it is observed that trunks of these an¬ 
cient trees rise of themselves to the surface. Staring ascribes this singular 
phenomenon to the agitation of the ground by the tread of cattle. “ When 
roadbeds,” observes he, “ are constructed of gravel and pebbles of differ¬ 
ent sizes, and these latter are placed at the bottom without being broken 
and rolled hard together, they are soon brought to the top by the effect of 
travel on the road. Lying loosely, they undergo some motion from the 
passage of every wagon wheel and the tread of every horse that passes 
over them. This motion is an oscillation or partial rolling, and as one 
side of a pebble is raised, a little fine sand or earth is forced under it, and 
the frequent repetition of this process by cattle or carriages moving in 
opposite directions brings it at last to the surface. We may suppose that 
a similar effect is produced on the stems of trees in the bogs by the tread 
of animals .”—Be Bodem van Nederland , i, pp. 75, 76. 

It is observed in the Northern United States, that when soils containing 
pebbles are cleared and cultivated, and the stones removed from the sur¬ 
face, new pebbles, and even bowlders of many pounds weight, continue to 
show themselves above the ground, every spring, for a long series of years. 
In clayey soils the fence posts are thrown up in a similar way, and it is not 
uncommon to see the lower rail of a fence thus gradually raised a foot or 
even two feet above the,ground. This rising of stones and fences is popu¬ 
larly ascribed to the action of the severe frosts of that climate. The 
expansion of the ground, in freezing, it is said, raises its surface, and, with 
the surface, objects lying near or connected with it. When the soil thaws 
in the spring, it settles back again to its former level, while the pebbles 
and posts are prevented from sinking as low as before bv loose earth which 


DRAINAGE OF LANDS DIKED IN. 


345 


Notwithstanding this slow sinking, most of the land enclosed 
by dikes is still above low-water mark, and can, therefore, be 
wholly or partially freed from rain water, and from that re¬ 
ceived by infiltration from higher ground, by sluices opened 
at the ebb of the tide. For this purpose, the land is carefully 
ditched, and advantage is taken of every favorable occasion for 
discharging the water through the sluices. But the ground 
cannot be effectually drained by this means, unless it is ele¬ 
vated four or five feet, at least, above the level of the ebb tide, 
because the ditches would not otherwise have a sufficient 
descent to carry the water off in the short interval between 
ebb and flow, and because the moisture of the saturated sub¬ 
soil is always rising by capillary attraction. Whenever, there¬ 
fore, the soil has sunk below the level I have mentioned, and 
in cases where its surface has never been raised above it, 
pumps, worked by wind or some other mechanical power, 
must be very frequently employed to keep the land dry 
enough for pasturage and cultivation.* 

has fallen under them. The foot that the elevation spoken of is observed 
only in the spring, gives countenance to this theory, which is perhaps 
applicable also to the cases stated by Staring, and it is probable that the 
two causes above assigned, concur in producing the effect. 

The question of the subsidence of the Netherlandish coast has been 
much discussed. Not to mention earlier geologists, Venema, in several 
essays, and particularly in Net Dalen van de NoordelijJce Kuststreken van 
ons Land , 1854, adduces many facts and arguments to prove a slow sinking 
of the northern provinces of Holland. Laveleye (. Affaissement du sol et 
envasement des fieuves survenus dans les temps historiques , 1859), upon a 
still fuller investigation, arrives at the same conclusion. The eminent 
geologist Staring, however, who briefly refers to the subject in De Bodem 
van Nederland , i, p. 356 et seqq ., does not consider the evidence sufficient 
to prove anything more than the sinking of the surface of the polders 
from drying and consolidation. 

* The elevation of the lands enclosed by dikes—or polders , as they are 
called in Holland—above low water mark, depends upon the height of the 
tides, or, in other words, upon the difference between ebb and flood. The 
tide cannot deposit earth higher than it flows, and after the ground is once 
enclosed, the decay of the vegetables grown upon it and the addition of 
manures do not compensate the depression occasioned by drying and con- 


346 


DRAINING OF LAKES AND MARSHES. 


b. Draining of Lakes and Marshes. 

The substitution of steam engines for the feeble and uncer¬ 
tain action of windmills, in driving pumps, lias much facil¬ 
itated the removal of water from the polders, and the draining 
of lakes, marshes, and shallow bays, and thus given such an 
impulse to these enterprises, that not less than one hundred 
and ten thousand acres were reclaimed from the waters, and 
added to the agricultural domain of the Netherlands, between 
1815 and 1858. The most important of these undertakings 
was the draining of the Lake of Haarlem, and for this purpose 
some of the most powerful hydraulic engines ever constructed 
were designed and executed.* The origin of this lake is un¬ 
known. It is supposed by some geographers to be a part of 
an ancient bed of the Rhine, the channel of which, as there is 
good reason to believe, has undergone great changes since the 
Homan invasion of the Netherlands ; by others it is thought 
to have once formed an inland marine channel, separated from 
the sea by a chain of low islands, which the sand washed up 
by the tides lias since connected with the mainland and con¬ 
verted into a continuous line of coast. The best authorities, 
however, find geological evidence that the surface occupied by 
the lake was originally a marshy tract containing within its 
limits little solid ground, but many ponds and inlets, and 
much floating as well as fixed fen. 

In consequence of the cutting of turf for fuel, and the de- 

solidation. On the coast of Zeeland and the islands of South Holland, the 
tides, and of course the surface of the lands deposited by them, are so high 
that the polders can he drained by ditching and sluices, but at other points, 
as in the enclosed grounds of North Holland on the Zuiderzee, where the 
tide rises but three feet or even less, pumping is necessary from the be¬ 
ginning.— Staking, Voormaals en Thans , p. 152. 

* The principal engine—called the Leeghwater, from the name of an 
engineer who had proposed the draining of the lake in 1641—was of 500 
horse power, and drove eleven pumps making six strokes per minute. 
Each pump raised six cubic metres, or nearly eight cubic yards of water to 
the stroke, amounting in all to 23,760 cubic metres, or above 31,000 cubic 
yards, the hour.— Wild, Die Niederlande , i, p. 87. 


DRAINING OF THE LAKE OF HAARLEM. 347 

struction of the few trees and shrubs which held the loose soil 
together with their roots, the ponds are supposed to have grad¬ 
ually extended themselves, until the action of the wind upon 
their enlarged surface gave their waves sufficient force to over¬ 
come the resistance of the feeble barriers which separated 
them, and to unite them all into a single lake. Popular tradi¬ 
tion, it is true, ascribes the formation of the Lake of Haarlem 
to a single irruption of the sea, at a remote period, and con¬ 
nects it with one or another of the destructive inundations of 
which the Netherland chronicles describe so many; but on a 
map of the year 1531, a chain of four smaller waters occupies 
nearly the ground afterward covered by the Lake of Haarlem, 
and they have more probably been united by gradual en¬ 
croachments resulting from the improvident practices above 
referred to, though no doubt the consummation may have 
been hastened by floods, and by the neglect to maintain dikes, 
or the intentional destruction of them, in the long wars of the 
sixteenth century. 

The Lake of Haarlem was a body of water not far from 
fifteen miles in length, by seven in greatest width, lying be¬ 
tween the cities of Amsterdam and Leyden, running parallel 
with the coast of Holland at the distance of about five miles 
from the sea, and covering an area of about 45,000 acres. By 
means of the Ij, it communicated with the Zuiderzee, the 
Mediterranean of the Netherlands, and its surface was little 
above the mean elevation of that of the sea. Whenever, there¬ 
fore, the waters of the Zuiderzee were acted upon by strong 
northwest winds, those of the Lake of Haarlem were raised pro¬ 
portionally and driven southward, while winds from the south 
tended to create a flow in the opposite direction. The shores 
of the lake were everywhere low, and though in the course of 
the eighty years between 1767 and 1848 more than £350,000 
or $1,700,000 had been expended in checking its encroach¬ 
ments, it often burst its barriers, and produced destructive 
inundations. On the 29th of November, 1836, a south wind 
brought its waters to the very gates of Amsterdam, and on the 
26th of December of the same year, in a northwest gale, they 


848 DRAINING OF THE LAKE OF HAARLEM. 

overflowed twenty thousand acres of land at the southern ex¬ 
tremity of the lake, and flooded a part of the city of Leyden. 
The depth of water did not, in general, exceed fourteen feet, 
but the bottom was a semi-fluid ooze or slime, which partook 
of the agitation of the waves, and added considerably to their 
mechanical force. Serious fears were entertained that the lake 
would form a junction with the inland waters of the Legmeer 
and Mijdrecht, swallow up a vast extent of valuable soil, and 
finally endanger the security of a large proportion of the land 
which the industry of Holland had gained in the course of 
centuries from the ocean. 

For this reason, and for the sake of the large addition the 
bottom of the lake would make to the cultivable soil of the 
state, it was resolved to drain it, and the preliminary steps for 
that purpose were commenced in the year 1840. The first 
operation was to surround the entire lake with a ring canal 
and dike, in order to cut off the communication with the Ij, and 
to exclude the water of the streams and morasses which dis¬ 
charged themselves into it from the land side. The dike was 
composed of different materials, according to the means of sup¬ 
ply at different points, such as sand from the coast dunes, earth 
and turf excavated from the line of the ring canal, and floating 
turf,* fascines being everywhere used to bind and compact the 

* In England and New England, where the marshes have been already- 
drained or are of comparatively small extent, the existence of large floating 
islands seems incredible, and has sometimes been treated as a fable, but no 
geographical fact is better established. Kohl (Inseln und Marschen Schles- 
wig-Holsteins , iii, p. 309) reminds us that Pliny mentions among the 
wonders of Germany the floating islands, covered with trees, which met 
the Roman fleets at the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser. Our author 
speaks also of having visited, in the territory of Bremen, floating moors, 
bearing not only houses but whole villages. At low stages of the water 
these moors rest upon a bed of sand, but are raised from six to ten feet by 
the high water of spring, and remain afloat until, in the course of the sum¬ 
mer, the water beneath is exhausted by evaporation and drainage, when 
they sink down upon the sand again. 

Staring explains, in an interesting way, the whole growth, formation, and 
functions of floating fens or bogs, in his very valuable work, Be Bodem van 


DRAINING OF THE LAKE OF HAARLEM. 


349 


mass together. This operation was completed in 1848, and 
three steam pumps were then employed for five years in dis¬ 
charging the water. The whole enterprise was conducted at 
the expense of the state, and in 1853 the recovered lands were 

Nederlandl, i, pp. 36-43. The substance of his account is as follows: The 
first condition for the growth of the plants which compose the substance 
of turf and the surface of the fens, is stillness of the water. Hence they 
are not found in running streams, nor in pools so large as to he subject to 
frequent agitation by the wind. For example, not a single plant grew in 
the open part of the Lake of Haarlem, and fens cease to form in all pools 
as soon as, by the cutting of the turf for fuel or other purposes, their area 
is sufficiently enlarged to be much acted on by wind. When still water 
above a yard deep is left undisturbed, aquatic plants of various genera, 
such as Nuphar, Hymphsea, Limnanthemum, Stratiotes, Polygonum, and 
Potamogeton, fill the bottom with roots and cover the surface with leaves. 
Many of the plants die every year, and prepare at the bottom a soil fit for 
the growth of a higher order of vegetation, Phragmites, Acorus, Spar- 
ganium, Rumex, Lythrum, Pedicularis, Spiraea, Polystichum, Comarum, 
Caltha, &c., &c. In the course of twenty or thirty years the muddy 
bottom is filled with roots of aquatic and marsh plants, which are lighter 
than water, and if the depth is great enough to give room for detaching 
this vegetable network, a couple of yards for example, it rises to the sur¬ 
face, bearing with it, of course, the soil formed above it by decay of stems 
and leaves. Hew genera now appear upon the mass, such as Carex, Men- 
vanthes, and others, and soon thickly cover it. The turf has now acquired 
a thickness of from two to four feet, and is called in Groningen lad; in 
Friesland, til, tilland, or drijftil; in Overijssel, Jcrag; and in Holland, 
rietzod. It floats about as driven by the wind, gradually increasing in 
thickness by the decay of its annual crops of vegetation, and in about half 
a century reaches the bottom and becomes fixed. If it has not been in¬ 
vaded in the mean time by men or cattle, trees and arborescent plants, 
Alnus, Salix, Myrica, &c. appear, and these contribute to hasten the attach¬ 
ment of the turf to the bottom, both by their weight and by sending their 
roots quite through into the ground. 

This is the regular method employed by nature for the gradual filling 
up of shallow lakes and pools, and converting them first into morass and 
then into dry land. When ver therefore man removes the peat or turf, he 
exerts an injurious geographical agency, and, as I have already said, there 
is no doubt that the immense extension of the inland seas of Holland in 
modern times is owing to this and other human imprudences. “Hundreds 
of hectares of floating pastures,” says our author, u which have nothing in 
their appearance to distinguish them from grass lands resting on solid bog, 


350 


BENEFITS OF THE ENTERPRISE. 


offered for sale for its benefit. Up to 1858, forty-two thou¬ 
sand acres bad been sold at not far from sixteen pounds ster¬ 
ling or seventy-seven dollars an acre, amounting altogether to 
£661,000 sterling or $3,200,000. The unsold lands were val¬ 
ued at more than £6,000 or nearly $30,000, and as the total 
cost was £164,500 or about $3,100,000, the direct loss to the 
state, exclusive of interest on the capital expended, may be 
stated at £100,000 or something less than $500,000. 

In a country like the United States, of almost boundless 
extent of sparsely inhabited territory, such an expenditure for 
such an object would be poor economy. But Holland has a 
narrow domain, great pecuniary resources, an excessively 
crowded population, and a consequent need of enlarged room 
and opportunity for the exercise of industry. Under such cir¬ 
cumstances, and especially with an exposure to dangers so 
formidable, there is no question of the wisdom of the measure. 
It has already provided homes and occupation for more than 

are found in Overijssel, in North Holland and near Utrecht. In short, they 
occur in all deep bogs, and wherever deep water is left long undisturbed.” 

In one case, a floating island, which had attached itself to the shore, 
continued to float about for a long time after it was torn off by a flood, 
and was solid enough to keep a pond of fresh water upon it sweet, though 
the water in which it was swimming had become brackish from the irrup¬ 
tion of the sea. After the hay is cut, cattle are pastured upon these 
islands, and they sometimes have large trees growing upon them. 

When the turf or peat has been cut, leaving water less than a yard 
deep, Equisetum limosum grows at once, and is followed by the second 
class of marsh plants mentioned above. Their roots do not become de¬ 
tached from the bottom in such shallow water, but form ordinary turf or 
peat. These processes are so rapid that a thickness of from three to six 
feet of turf is formed in half a century, and many men have lived to mow 
grass where they had fished in their boyhood, and to cut turf twice in the 
same spot. 

Captain Gilliss says that before Lake Taguataga in Chili was drained, 
there were in it islands composed of dead plants matted together to a 
thickness of from four to six feet, and with trees of medium size growing 
upon them. These islands floated before tho wind “ with their trees and 
browsing cattle .”—United States Naval Astronomical Expedition to the 
Southern Hemisphere , i, pp. 16, 17. 


PRIMITIVE CONDITION OF THE NETHERLANDS. 351 

live thousand citizens, and furnished a profitable investment 
for a capital of not less than £400,000 sterling or $2,000,000, 
which has been expended in improvements over and above the 
purchase money of the soil; and the greater part of this sum, 
as well as of the cost of drainage, has been paid as a compen¬ 
sation for labor. The excess of governmental expenditure over 
the receipts, if employed in constructing ships of war or fortifi¬ 
cations, would have added little to the military strength of the 
kingdom ; but the increase of territory, the multiplication of 
homes and firesides which the people have an interest in de¬ 
fending, and the augmentation of agricultural resources, con¬ 
stitute a stronger bulwark against foreign invasion than a ship 
of the line or a fortress armed with a hundred cannon. 

The bearing of the works I have noticed, and of others 
similar in character, upon the social and moral, as well as the 
purely economical interests of the people of the Netherlands, 
has induced me to describe them more in detail than the gen¬ 
eral purpose of this volume may be thought to justify ; but if 
we consider them simply from a geographical point of view, 
we shall find that they are possessed of no small importance as 
modifications of the natural condition of terrestrial surface. 
There is good reason to believe that before the establishment 
of a partially civilized race upon the territory now occupied 
by Dutch, Frisic, and Low German communities, the grounds 
not exposed to inundation were overgrown with dense woods, 
that the lowlands between these forests and the sea coasts were 
marshes, covered and partially solidified by a thick matting 
of peat plants and shrubs interspersed with trees, and that 
even the sand dunes of the shore were protected by a vege¬ 
table growth which, in a great measure, prevented the drifting 
and translocation of them. 

The present causes of river and coast erosion existed, in¬ 
deed, at the period in question ; but some of them must have 
acted with less intensity, there were strong natural safeguards 
against the influence of marine and fresli-water currents, and 
the conflicting tendencies had arrived at a condition of approx¬ 
imate equilibrium, which permitted but slow and gradual 


352 


CHANGES PRODUCED BY MAN. 


changes in the face of nature. The reduction of the forests 
around the sources and along the valleys of the rivers by man 
gave them a more torrential character. The felling of the 
trees, and the extirpation of the shrubbery upon the tens bv 
domestic cattle, deprived the surface of cohesion and consist¬ 
ence, and the cutting of peat for fuel opened cavities in it, 
which, filling at once with water, rapidly extended themselves 
by abrasion of their borders, and finally enlarged to pools, 
lakes, and gulfs, like the Lake of Haarlem and the northern 
part of the Zuiderzee. The cutting of the wood and the depas¬ 
turing of the grasses upon the sand dunes converted them from 
solid bulwarks against the ocean to loose accumulations of 
dust, which every sea breeze drove farther landward, burying, 
perhaps, fertile soil and choking up watercourses on one side, 
and exposing the coast to erosion by the sea upon the other. 

c. Geographical Influence of such Operations. 

The changes which human action has produced within 
twenty centuries in the Netherlands and the neighboring prov¬ 
inces, are certainly of no small geographical importance, con¬ 
sidered simply as a direct question of loss and gain of territory. 
They have also undoubtedly been attended with some climatic 
consequences, they have exercised a great influence on the 
spontaneous animal and vegetable life of this region, and they 
cannot have failed to produce effects upon tidal and other 
oceanic currents, the range of which may be very extensive. 
The force of the tidal wave, the height to which it rises, the 
direction of its currents, and, in fact, all the phenomena which 
characterize it, as well as all the effects it produces, depend as 
much upon the configuration of the coast it washes, and the 
depth of water, and form of bottom near the shore, as upon 
the attraction which occasions it. Every one of the terrestrial 
conditions which affect the character of tidal and other marine 
currents has been very sensibly modified by the operations I 
have described, and on this coast, at least, man has acted 
almost as powerfully on the physical geography of the sea as 
on that of the land. 



lowering of tiie lake of albano. 


353 


Lowering of Lakes. 

The hydraulic works of the Netherlands and of the neigh¬ 
boring states are of such magnitude, that they quite throw into 
the shade all other known artificial arrangements for defending 
the land against the encroachments of the rivers and the sea, 
and for reclaiming to the domain of agriculture and civiliza¬ 
tion soil long covered by the waters. But although the re¬ 
covery and protection of lands flooded by the sea seems to be 
an art wholly of Netherlandish origin, we have abundant evi¬ 
dence, that in ancient as well as in comparatively modern 
times, great enterprises more or less analogous in character 
have been successfully undertaken, both in inland Europe and 
in the less familiar countries of the East. 

One of the best known of these is the tunnel which serves 
to discharge the surplus waters of the Lake of Albano, about 
fourteen miles from Borne. This lake, about six miles in cir¬ 
cuit, occupies one of the craters of an extinct volcanic range, 
and the surface of its waters is about nine hundred feet above 
the sea. It is fed by rivulets and subterranean springs origi¬ 
nating in the Alban Mount, or Monte Cavo, the most elevated 
peak of the volcanic group just mentioned, which rises to the 
height of about three thousand feet. At present the lake has 
no discoverable natural outlet, but it is not known that the 
water ever stood at such a height as to flow regularly over the 
lip of the crater. It seems that at the earliest period of which 
we have any authentic memorials, its level was usually kept 
by evaporation, or by discharge through subterranean chan¬ 
nels, considerably below the rim of the basin which encom¬ 
passed it, but in the year 397 b. c., the water, either from the 
obstruction of such channels, or in consequence of increased 
supplies from unknown sources, rose to such a height as to 
flow over the edge of the crater, and threaten inundation to 
the country below by bursting through its walls. To obviate 
this danger, a tunnel for carrying off the water was pierced at 
a level much below the height to which it had risen. This 
gallery, cut entirely with the chisel through the rock for a 

23 


354 


LOWERING OF LAKE FUCINUS OR CELANO. 


distance of six thousand feet, or nearly a mile and one seventh, 
is still in so good condition as to serve its original purpose. 
The fact that this work was contemporaneous with the siege 
of Yeii, has given to ancient annalists occasion to connect the 
two events, but modern critics are inclined to reject Livy’s 
account of the matter, as one of the many improbable fables 
which disfigure the pages of that historian. It is, however, 
repeated by Cicero and by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and it 
is by no means impossible that, in an age when priests and 
soothsayers monopolized both the arts of natural magic and the 
little which yet existed of physical science, the Government of 
Home, by their aid, availed itself at once of the superstition 
and of the military ardor of its citizens to obtain their sanction 
to an enterprise which sounder arguments might not have 
induced them to approve. 

Still more remarkable is the tunnel cut by the Emperor 
Claudius to drain the Lake Fucinus, now Lago di Celano, in 
the Neapolitan territory, about fifty miles eastward of Home. 
This lake, as far as its history is known, has varied very con¬ 
siderably in its dimensions at different periods, according to 
the character of the seasons. It has no visible outlet, but was 
originally either drained by natural subterranean conduits, or 
kept within certain extreme limits by evaporation. In years 
of uncommon moisture, it spread over the adjacent soil and 
destroyed the crops; in dry seasons, it retreated, and produced 
epidemic disease by poisonous exhalations from the decay of 
vegetable and animal matter upon its exposed bed. Julius 
Caesar had proposed the construction of a tunnel to drain the 
lake, but the enterprise was not actually undertaken until the 
reign of Claudius, when—after a temporary failure, from 
errors in levelling by the engineers, as was pretended at the 
time, or, as now appears certain, in consequence of frauds by 
the contractors in the execution of the work—it was at least 
partially completed. From this imperfect construction, it 
soon got out of repair, but was restored by Hadrian, and seems 
to have answered its design for some centuries. In the bar¬ 
barism which followed the downfall of the empire, it again fell 


UNFORESEEN EFFECTS OF DRAINING AND LOWERING LAKES. 355 

into decay, and though numerous attempts were made to re¬ 
pair it during the Middle Ages, no tolerable success seems to 
have attended any of these efforts, until the present gen¬ 
eration. 

Works have now been some years in progress for restoring, 
or rather enlarging and rebuilding this ancient tunnel, upon a 
scale of grandeur which does infinite honor to the liberality 
and public spirit of the projectors, and with an ingenuity of 
design and a constructive skill which reflect the highest credit 
upon the professional ability of the engineers who have planned 
the works and directed their execution. The length of this 
tunnel is 18,634 feet, or rather more than three miles and a 
half. Of course, it is one of the longest subterranean galleries 
yet executed in Europe, and it offers many curious particulars 
in its original design which cannot here be described. The 
difference between the highest and the lowest known levels of 
the surface of the lake amounts to at least forty feet, and the 
difference of area covered at these respective stages is not 
much less than eight thousand acres. The tunnel will re¬ 
duce the water to a much lower point, and it is computed 
that, including the lands occasionally overflowed, not less than 
forty thousand acres of as fertile soil as any in Italy will be 
recovered from the lake and permanently secured from inun¬ 
dation by its waters. 

Many similar enterprises have been conceived and ex¬ 
ecuted in modern times, both for the purpose of reclaiming 
land covered by water and for sanitary reasons.* They are 
sometimes attended with wholly unexpected evils, as, for ex¬ 
ample, in the case of Barton Pond, in Vermont, and in that 
of the Lake Storsjo, in Sweden, already mentioned on a former 

* A considerable work of this character is mentioned by Captain Gilliss 
as having been executed in Chili, a country to which we should have 
hardly looked for an improvement of such a nature. The Lake Taguataga 
was partially drained by cutting through a narrow ridge of land, not at the 
natural outlet, but upon one side of the lake, and eight thousand acres of 
land covered by it were gained for cultivation.— U. S. Naval Astronomical 
Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere , i, pp. 16, 17. 


35G 


ORIGIN OF RIVER BOTTOMS OR INTERVALES. 


page. Another still less obvious consequence of the with¬ 
drawal of the waters has occasionally been observed in these 
operations. The hydrostatic force with which the water, in 
virtue of its specific gravity, presses against the banks that 
confine it, has a tendency to sustain them whenever their com¬ 
position and texture are not such as to expose them to soften¬ 
ing and dissolution by the infiltration of the water. If then, 
the slope of the banks is considerable, or if the earth of which 
they are composed rests on a smooth and slippery stratum 
inclining toward the bed of the lake, they are liable to fall or 
slide forward when the mechanical support of the water is 
removed, and this sometimes happens on a considerable scale. 
A few years ago, the surface of the Lake of Lungern, in the 
Canton of Unterwalden, in Switzerland, was lowered by driv¬ 
ing a tunnel about a quarter of a mile long through the nar¬ 
row ridge, called the Kaiserstuhl, which forms a barrier at the 
north end of the basin. When the water was drawn off, the 
banks, which are steep, cracked and burst, several acres of 
ground slid down as low as the water receded, and even the 
whole village of Lungern was thought to be in no small danger. 

Other inconveniences of a very serious character have often 
resulted from the natural wearing down, or, much more fre¬ 
quently, the imprudent destruction, of the barriers which con¬ 
fine mountain lakes. In their natural condition, such basins 
serve both to receive and retain the rocks and other detritus 
brought down by the torrents which empty into them, and to 
check the impetus of the rushing waters by bringing them to 
a temporary pause; but if the outlets are lowered so as to 
drain the reservoirs, the torrents continue their rapid flow 
through the ancient bed of the basins, and carry down with 
them the sand and gravel with which they are charged, in¬ 
stead of depositing their burden as before in the still waters of 
the lakes. 


Mountain Lakes. 

It is a common opinion in America that the river mead¬ 
ows, bottoms, or intervales , as they are popularly called, are 


MOUNTAIN LAKES. 


357 


generally the beds of ancient lakes wliicli have burst their 
barriers and left running currents in their place. It was shown 
by Dr. Dwight, many years ago, that this is very far from 
being universally true ; but there is no doubt that mountain 
lakes were of much more frequent occurrence in primitive 
than in modern geography, and there are many chains of such 
still existing in regions where man has yet little disturbed the 
original features of the earth. In the long valleys of the Adi¬ 
rondack range in Northern New York, and in the moun¬ 
tainous parts of Maine, eight, ten, and even more lakes and 
lakelets are sometimes found in succession, each emptying into 
the next lower pool, and so all at last into some considerable 
river. When the mountain slopes which supply these basins 
shall be stripped of their woods, the augmented swelling of 
the lakes will break down their barriers, their waters will run 
off, and the valleys will present successions of flats with rivers 
running through them, instead of chains of lakes connected by 
natural canals. 

A similar state of things seems to have existed in the an¬ 
cient geography of France. “ Nature,” says Lavergne, “ has 
not excavated on the flanks of our Alps reservoirs as magnifi¬ 
cent as those of Lombardy; she had, however, constructed 
smaller, but more numerous lakes, which the negligence of 
man has permitted to disappear. Auguste de Gasparin, 
brother of the illustrious agriculturist, demonstrated more 
than thirty years ago, in an original paper, that many natural 
dikes formerly existed in the mountain valleys, which have 
been swept away by the waters. He proposed to rebuild and 
to multiply them. This interesting suggestion has reappeared 
several times since, but has met with strong opposition from 
skilful engineers. It would, nevertheless, be well to try the 
experiment of creating artificial lakes which should fill them¬ 
selves with the water of melting snows and deluging rains, to 
be drawn out in times of drought. If this plan has able op- 
posers, it has also warm advocates. Experience alone can 
decide the question.” * 

* ficonomie Mur ale de la France , p. 289. 


358 CLIMATIC AND GEOGRAPHICAL EFFECTS OF AQUEDUCTS. 

Climatic Effects of Draining Lakes and Marshes. 

The draining of lakes, marshes, and other superficial accu¬ 
mulations of moisture, reduces the water surface of a country, 
and, of course, the evaporation from it. Lakes, too, in elevated 
positions, lose a part of their water by infiltration, and thereby 
supply other lakes, springs, and rivulets at lower levels. Hence, 
it is evident that the draining of such waters, if carried on 
upon a large scale, must affect both the humidity and the tem¬ 
perature of the atmosphere, and the permanent supply of 
w r ater for extensive districts.* 


Geographical and Climatic Effects of Aqueducts , Reservoirs, 

and Canals. 

Many processes of internal improvement, such as aque¬ 
ducts for the supply of great cities, railroad cuts and embank¬ 
ments, and the like, divert water from its natural channels, 
and affect its distribution and ultimate discharge. The col¬ 
lecting of the waters of a considerable district into reservoirs, 
to be thence carried off by means of aqueducts, as, for ex¬ 
ample, in the forest of Belgrade, near Constantinople, deprives 
the grounds originally watered by the springs and rivulets of 
the necessary moisture, and reduces them to barrenness. Sim¬ 
ilar effects must have followed from the construction of the 
numerous aqueducts which supplied ancient .Rome with such 
a profuse abundance of water. On the other hand, the filtra¬ 
tion of water through the banks or walls of an aqueduct car- 

* In a note on a former page of this volume I noticed an observation 
of Jacini, to the effect that the great Italian lakes discharge themselves 
partly by infiltration beneath the hills which bound them. The amount 
of such infiltration must depend much upon the hydrostatic pressure on 
the walls of the lake basins, and, of course, the lowering of the surface of 
these lakes, by diminishing that pressure, would diminish also the infil¬ 
tration. It is now proposed to lower the level of the Lake of Como some 
feet by deepening its outlet. It is possible that the effect of this may 
manifest itself in a diminution of the water in springs and fontanili or 
artesian wells in Lombardy. 


GEOGRAPHICAL EFFECTS OF CANALS. 359 

ried upon a high level across low ground, often injures the 
adjacent soil, and is prejudicial to the health of the neighbor¬ 
ing population ; and it has been observed in Switzerland, that 
fevers have been produced by the stagnation of the water in 
excavations from which earth had been taken to form embank¬ 
ments for railways. 

If we consider only the influence of physical improvements 
on civilized life, we shall perhaps ascribe to navigable canals a 
higher importance, or at least a more diversified influence, 
than to any other works of man designed to contrdl the waters 
of the earth, and to affect their distribution. They bind dis¬ 
tant regions together by social ties, through the agency of the 
commerce they promote ; they facilitate the transportation of 
military stores and engines, and of other heavy material con¬ 
nected with the discharge of the functions of government; they 
encourage industry by giving marketable value to raw ma¬ 
terial and to objects of artificial elaboration which would other¬ 
wise be worthless on account of the cost of conveyance ; they 
supply from their surplus waters means of irrigation and of 
mechanical power ; and, in many other ways, they contribute 
much to advance the prosperity and civilization of nations. Nor 
are they wholly without geographical importance. They some¬ 
times drain lands by conveying off water which would other¬ 
wise stagnate on the surface, and, on the other hand, like aque¬ 
ducts, they render the neighboring soil cold and moist by the 
percolation of water through their embankments ; * they dam 

* Simonde, speaking of the Tuscan canals, observes: “ But inundations 
are not the only damage caused by the waters to the plains of Tuscany. 
Raised, as the canals are, above the soil, the water percolates through 
their banks, penetrates every obstruction, and, in spite of all the efforts 
of industry, sterilizes and turns to morasses fields which nature and the 
richness of the soil seemed to have designed for the most abundant har¬ 
vests. In ground thus pervaded with moisture, or rendered cold, as the 
Tuscans express it, by the filtration of the canal water, the vines and the 
mulberries, after having for a few years yielded fruit of a saltish taste, rot 
and perish. The wheat decays in the ground, or dies as soon as it sprouts. 
Winter crops are given up, and summer cultivation tried for a time ; but 
the increasing humidity, and the saline matter communicated to the earth 


360 


SUPERFICIAL DRAINING. 


up, check, and divert the course of natural currents, and de¬ 
liver them at points opposite to, or distant from, their original 
outlets; they often require extensive reservoirs to feed them, 
thus retaining through the year accumulations of water— 
which would otherwise run oft', or evaporate in the dry sea¬ 
son—and thereby enlarging the evaporable surface of the 
country ; and we have already seen that they interchange the 
flora and the fauna of provinces widely separated by nature. 
All these modes of action certainly influence climate and the 
character of terrestrial surface, though our means of observa¬ 
tion are not yet perfected enough to enable us to appreciate 
and measure their effects. 

Climatic and Geographical Effects of Surf ace and 
Underground Draining. 

I have commenced this chapter with a description of the 
dikes and other hydraulic works of the Netlierland engineers, 
because the geographical results of such operations are more 
obvious and more easily measured, though certainly not more 
important, than those of the older and more widely diffused 
inodes of resisting or directing the flow of waters, which have 
been practised from remote antiquity in the interior of all 
civilized countries. Draining and irrigation are habitually 
regarded as purely agricultural processes, having little or no 
relation to technical geography; but we shall find that they 
exert a powerful influence on soil, climate, and animal and 
vegetable life, and may, therefore, justly claim to be regarded 
as geographical elements. 

Surface and Under-draining and their Effects. 

Superficial draining is a necessity in all lands newly re¬ 
claimed from the forest. The face of the ground in the woods 

—which affects the taste of all its products, even to the grasses, which the 
cattle refuse to touch—at last compel the husbandman to abandon his 

fields, and leave uncultivated a soil that no longer repays his labor.”_ 

Tableau de VAgriculture Toscane , pp. 11, 12. 


UNDER-DRAINING. 


361 


is never so regularly inclined as to permit water to flow freely 
over it. There are, even on the hillsides, many small ridges 
and depressions, partly belonging to the original distribution 
of the soil, and partly occasioned by irregularities in the 
growth and deposit of vegetable matter. These, in the hus¬ 
bandry of nature, serve as dams and reservoirs to collect a 
larger supply of moisture than the spongy earth can at once 
imbibe. Besides this, the vegetable mould is, even under the 
most favorable circumstances, slow in parting with the hu- 
midity it has accumulated under the protection of the woods, 
and the. infiltration from neighboring forests contributes to 
keep the soil of small clearings too wet for the advantageous 
cultivation of artificial crops. For these reasons, surface drain¬ 
ing must have commenced with agriculture itself, and there is 
probablv no cultivated district, one may almost say no single 
field, which is not provided with artificial arrangements for 
facilitating the escape of superficial water, and thus carrying off 
moisture which, in the natural condition of the earth, would 
have been imbibed by the soil. 

The beneficial effects of surface drainage, the necessity of 
extending the fields as population increased, and the incon¬ 
veniences resulting from the presence of marshes in otherwise 
improved regions, must have suggested at a very early period 
of human industry the expediency of converting bogs and 
swamps into dry land by drawing off their waters; and it 
would not be long after the introduction of this practice before 
further acquisition of agricultural territory would be made by 
lowering the outlet of small ponds and lakes, and adding the 
ground they covered to the domain of the husbandman. 

All these processes belong to the incipient civilization of 
the ante-historical periods, but the construction of subterranean 
channels for the removal of infiltrated water marks ages and 
countries distinguished by a great advance in agricultural 
theory and practice, a great accumulation of pecuniary capital, 
and a density of population which creates a ready demand and 
a high price for all products of rural industry. Under-drain¬ 
ing, too, would be most advantageous in damp and cool cli- 


362 


BE AIN AGE BY BOEING. 


mates, where evaporation is slow, and upon soils where the 
natural inclination of surface does not promote a very rapid 
flow of the surface waters. All the conditions required to 
make this mode of rural improvement, if not absolutely neces¬ 
sary, at least apparently profitable, exist in Great Britain, and 
it is, therefore, very natural that the wealthy and intelligent 
farmers of England should have carried this practice farther, 
and reaped a more abundant pecuniary return from it, than 
those of any other country. 

Besides superficial and subsoil drains, there is another 
method of disposing of superfluous surface water, which, how¬ 
ever, can rarely be practised, because the necessary conditions 
for its employment are not of frequent occurrence. Whenever 
a tenacious water-holding stratum rests on a loose, gravelly 
bed, so situated as to admit of a free discharge of water from 
or through it by means of the outcropping of the bed at a lower 
level, or of deep-lying conduits leading to distant points of 
discharge, superficial waters may be carried off by opening a 
passage for them through the impervious into the permeable 
stratum. Thus, according to Bischof, as early as the time of 
King Bene, in the first half of the fifteenth century, the plain 
of Paluns, near Marseilles, was laid dry by boring, and Wittwer 
informs us that drainage is effected at Munich by conducting 
the superfluous water into large excavations, from which it 
filters through into a lower stratum of pebble and gravel lying 
a little above the level of the river Isar.* So at Washington, 
in the western part of the city, which lies high above the rivers 
Potomac and Bock Creek, many houses are provided with dry 
wells for draining their cellars and foundations. These extend 
through hard tenacious earth to the depth of thirty or forty 
feet, when they strike a stratum of gravel, through which the 
water readily passes off. 

This practice has been extensively employed at Paris, not 
merely for carrying off ordinary surface water, but for the dis- 

* Physilcalische Geographie , p. 288. Draining by driving down stakes, 
mentioned in a note in a chapter on the woods, ante, is a process of the 
same nature. 


EFFECTS OF DRAINING ON TEMPERATURE. 363 

charge of offensive and deleterious fluids from chemical and 
manufacturing establishments. A well of this sort received, 
in the winter of 1832-’33, twenty thousand gallons per day 
of the foul water from a starch factory, and the same process 
was largely used in other factories. The apprehension of 
injury to common and artesian wells and springs led to an 
investigation on this subject, in behalf of the municipal author¬ 
ities, by Girard and Parent Duchatelet, in the latter year. 
The report of these gentlemen, published in the Annales des 
Pouts et Chaussees for 1833, second half year, is full of curious 
and instructive facts respecting the position and distribution 
of the subterranean waters under and near Paris ; but it must 
suffice to say that the report came to the conclusion that, in 
consequence of the absolute immobility of these waters, and 
the relatively small quantity of noxious fluid to be conveyed 
to them, there was no danger of the diffusion of this latter, if 
discharged into them. This result will not surprise those who 
know that, in another work, Duchatelet maintains analogous 
opinions as to the effect of the discharge of the city sewers 
into the Seine upon the waters of that river. The quantity of 
matter delivered by them he holds to be so nearly infinites¬ 
imal, as compared with the volume of water of the Seine, that 
it cannot possibly affect it to a sensible degree. I would, how¬ 
ever, advise determined water drinkers living at Paris to adopt 
his conclusions, without studying his facts and his arguments; 
for it is quite possible that he may convert his readers to a 
faith opposite to his own, and that they will finally agree with 
the poet who held water an “ ignoble beverage. 75 

Climatic and Geographical Effects of Surface Draining. 

When we remove water from the surface, we diminish the 
evaporation from it, and, of course, the refrigeration which 
accompanies all evaporation is diminished in proportion. 
Hence superficial draining ought to be attended with an ele¬ 
vation of atmospheric temperature, and, in cold countries, it 
might be expected to lessen the frequency of frosts. Accord¬ 
ingly, it is a fact of experience that, other things being equal, 


364 EFFECTS OF DRAINING ON TEMPERATURE. 

dry soils, and the air in contact with them, are perceptibly 
warmer during the season of vegetation, when evaporation is 
most rapid, than moist lands and the atmospheric stratum 
resting upon them. Instrumental observation on this special 
point has not yet been undertaken on a very large scale, but 
still we have thermometric data sufficient to warrant the general 
conclusion, and the influence of drainage in diminishing the 
frequency of frost appears to be even better established than a 
direct increase of atmospheric temperature. The steep and 
dry uplands of the Green Mountain range in Hew England 
often escape frosts when the Indian corn harvest on moister 
grounds, five hundred or even a thousand feet lower, is de¬ 
stroyed or greatly injured by them. The neighborhood of a 
marsh is sure to be exposed to late spring and early autumnal 
frosts, but they cease to be feared after it is drained, and this 
is particularly observable in very cold climates, as, for ex¬ 
ample, in Lapland.* 

In England, under-drains are not generally laid below the 
reach of daily variations of temperature, or below a point from 
which moisture might be brought to the surface by capillary 
attraction and evaporated by the heat of the sun. They, there¬ 
fore, like surface drains, withdraw' from local solar action much 
moisture which would otherwise be vaporized by it, and, at 
the same time, by drying the soil above them, they increase its 
effective hygroscopicity, and it consequently absorbs from the 
atmosphere a greater quantity of water than it did when, for 
want of under-drainage, the subsoil was always humid, if not 
saturated. Under-drains, then, contribute to the dryness as 
well as to the warmth of the atmosphere, and, as dry ground 
is more readily heated by the rays of the sun than v'et, they 
tend also to raise the mean, and especially the summer tem¬ 
perature of the soil. 

* “ The simplest backwoodsman knows by experience that all culti¬ 
vation is impossible in the neighborhood of bogs and marshes. "Why is a 
crop near the borders of a marsh cnt off by frost, while a field npon a 
hillock, a few stone’s throws from it, is spared ? ”— Laes Levi L^estadiub, 
Om Uppodlingar i Lappmarken , pp. 69, 74. 


' UNFORESEEN EFFECTS OF DRAINING. 


365 


So far as respects the immediate improvement of soil and 
climate, and tlie increased abundance of the harvests, the Eng- 
lisli system of surface and subsoil drainage has fully justified 
the eulogiums of its advocates; but its extensive adoption 
appears to have been attended with some altogether unforeseen 
and undesirable consequences, very analogous to those which 
I have described as resulting from the clearing of the forests. 
The under-drains carry off very rapidly the water imbibed by 
the soil from precipitation, and through infiltration from neigh¬ 
boring springs or other sources of supply. Consequently, in 
wet seasons, or after heavy rains, a river bordered by artifi¬ 
cially drained lands receives in a few hours, from superficial 
and from subterranean conduits, an accession of water which, 
in the natural state of the earth, would have reached it only 
by small instalments after percolating through hidden paths 
for weeks or even months, and would have furnished perennial 
and comparatively regular contributions, instead of swelling 
deluges, to its channel. Thus, when human impatience rashly 
substitutes swiftly acting artificial contrivances for the slow 
methods by which nature drains the surface and superficial 
strata of a river basin, the original equilibrium is disturbed, 
the waters of the heavens are no longer stored up in the earth 
to be gradually given out again, but are hurried out of man’s 
domain with wasteful haste ; and while the inundations of the 
river are sudden and disastrous, its current, when the drains 
have run dry, is reduced to a rivulet, it ceases to supply the 
power to drive the machinery for which it was once amply 
sufficient, and scarcely even waters the herds that pasture upon 
its margin.* 

Irrigation and its Climatic and Geographical Effects. 

We know little of the history of the extinct civilizations 
which preceded the culture of the classic ages, and no nation 
has, in modern times, spontaneously emerged from barbarism, 

* Babinet condemns even the general draining of marshes. “ Drain¬ 
ing,” says he, “has been much in fashion for some years. It has been a 
special object to dry and fertilize marshy grounds. My opinion has always 


366 


ORIGIN OF IRRIGATION. 


and created for itself the arts of social life.* The improve¬ 
ments of the savage races whose history we can distinctly trace 
are borrowed and imitative, and our theories as to the origin 
and natural development of industrial art are conjectural. Of 
course, the relative antiquity of particular branches of human 
industry depends much upon the natural character of soil, cli¬ 
mate, and spontaneous vegetable and animal life in different 
countries; and while the geographical influence of man would, 
under given circumstances, be exerted in one direction, it 
would, under different conditions, act in an opposite or a 
diverging line. I have given some reasons for thinking that 
in the climates to which our attention has been chiefly directed, 
man’s first interference with the natural arrangement and dis¬ 
posal of the waters was in the way of drainage of surface. 
But if we are to judge from existing remains alone, w r e should 
probably conclude that irrigation is older than drainage ; for, 
in the regions regarded by general tradition as the cradle of 
the human race, we find traces of canals evidently constructed 
for the former purpose at a period long preceding the ages of 
which we have any written memorials. There are, in ancient 
Armenia, extensive districts which were already abandoned to 
desolation at the earliest historical epoch, but which, in a yet 
remoter antiquity, had been irrigated by a complicated and 
highly artificial system of canals, the lines of which can still 
be followed; and there are, in all the highlands where the 
sources of the Euphrates rise, in Persia, in Egypt, in India, 

been that excessive dryness is thus produced, and that other soils in the 
neighborhood are sterilized in proportion.” 

* I ought perhaps to except the Mexicans and the Peruvians, whose 
arts and institutions are not yet shown to be historically connected with 
those of any more ancient people. The lamentable destruction of so many 
memorials of these tribes, by the ignorance and bigotry of the so-called 
Christian barbarians who conquered them, has left us much in the dark as 
to many points of their civilization; but they seem to have reached that 
stage where continued progress in knowledge and in power over nature is 
secure, and a few more centuries of independence might have brought 
them to originate for themselves most of the great inventions which the 
last four centuries have bestowed upon man. 


EXTENT OF IRRIGATION IN EUROPE. 


367 


and in China, works of this sort which must have been in 
existence before man had begun to record his own annals. 

In warm countries, such as most of those just mentioned, 
the effects I have described as usually resulting from the clear¬ 
ing of the forests would very soon follow. In such climates, 
the rains are inclined to he periodical; they are also violent, 
and for these reasons the soil would he parched in summer 
and liable to wash in winter. In these countries, therefore, the 
necessity for irrigation must soon have been felt, and its intro¬ 
duction into mountainous regions like Armenia must have 
been immediately followed by a system of terracing, or at 
least scarping the hillsides. Pasture and meadow, indeed, 
may be irrigated even when the surface is both steep and irreg¬ 
ular, as may be observed abundantly on the Swiss as well as 
on the Piedmontese slope of the Alps; but in dry climates, 
plough land and gardens on hilly grounds require terracing, 
both for supporting the soil and for administering water by 
irrigation, and it should be remembered that terracing, of 
itself, even without special arrangements for controlling the 
distribution of water, prevents or at least checks the flow of 
rain water, and gives it time to sink into the ground instead 
of running off over the surface. 

There are few things in Continental husbandry which sur¬ 
prise English or American observers so much as the extent to 
which irrigation is employed in agriculture, and that, too, on 
soils, and with a temperature, where their own experience 
would have led them to suppose it would be injurious to vege¬ 
tation rather than beneficial to it. The summers in Northern 
Italy, though longer, are very often not warmer than in New 
England ; and in ordinary years, the summer rains are as fre¬ 
quent and as abundant in the former country as in the latter. 
Yet in Piedmont and Lombardy, irrigation is bestowed upon 
almost every crop, while in New England it is never employed 
at all in farming husbandry, or indeed for any purpose except 
in kitchen gardens, and possibly, in rare cases, in some other 
small branch of agricultural industry.* 

* The necessity of irrigation in the great alluvial plain of Northern 


368 


IRRIGATION IN PALESTINE. 


The summers in Egypt, in Syria, and in Asia Minor, and 
even Rumelia, are almost rainless. In such climates, the 
necessity of irrigation is obvious, and the loss of the ancient 
means of furnishing it readily explains the diminished fertility 
of most of the countries in question.* The surface of Pales- 

Italy is partly explained by the fact that the superficial stratum of fine 
earth and vegetable mould is very extensively underlaid by beds of pebbles 
and gravel brought down by mountain torrents at a remote epoch. The 
water of the surface soil drains rapidly down into these loose beds, and 
passes off by subterranean channels to some unknown point of discharge; 
but this circumstance alone is not a sufficient solution. Is it not possible 
that the habits of vegetables, grown in countries where irrigation has been 
immemorially employed, have been so changed that they require water 
under conditions of soil and climate where their congeners, which have 
not been thus indulgently treated, do not ? 

There are some atmospheric phenomena in Northern Italy, which an 
American finds it hard to reconcile with what he has observed in the 
United States. To an American eye, for instance, the sky of Piedmont, 
Lombardy, and the northern coast of the Mediterranean, is always whitish 
and curdled, and it never has the intensity and fathomless depth of the 
blue of his native heavens. And yet the heat of the srnfis rays, as meas¬ 
ured by sensation, and, at the same time, the evaporation, are greater than 
they would be with the thermometer at the same point in America. I 
have frequently felt in Italy, with the mercury below 60° Fahrenheit, and 
with a mottled and almost opaque sky, a heat of solar irradiation which 
I can compare to nothing but the scorching sensation experienced in 
America at a temperature twenty degrees higher, during the intervals be¬ 
tween showers, or before a rain, when the clear blue of the sky seems 
infinite in depth and transparency. Such circumstances may create a 
necessity for irrigation where it would otherwise be superfluous, if not 
absolutely injurious. 

In speaking of the superior apparent clearness of the shy in America, I 
confine myself to the concave vault of the heavens, and do not mean to 
assert that terrestrial objects are generally visible at greater distances in 
the United States than in Italy. Indeed I am rather disposed to maintain 
the contrary ; for though I know that the lower strata of the atmosphere 
in Europe never equal in transparency the air near the earth in New 
Mexico, Peru, and Chili, yet I think the accidents of the coast line of the 
Riviera, as, for example, between Nice and La Spezia, and those of the in¬ 
comparable Alpine parorama seen from Turin, are distinguishable at greater 
distances than they would be in the United States. 

* In Egypt, evaporation and absorption by the earth are so rapid, that 


IRRIGATION IN PALESTINE. 


369 


tine, for example, is composed, in a great measure, of rounded 
limestone hills, once, no doubt, covered with forests. These 
were partially removed before the Jewish conquest.* When 
the soil began to suffer from drought, reservoirs to retain the 
waters of winter were hewn in the rock near the tops of the 
hills, and the declivities were terraced. So long as the cisterns 
were in good order, and the terraces kept up, the fertility of 
Palestine was unsurpassed, but when misgovernment and for- 

all annual crops require irrigation during the whole period of their growth. 
As fast as the water retires by the subsidence of the annual inundation, the 
seed is sown upon the still moist uncovered soil, and irrigation begins at 
once. Upon the Nile, you hear the creaking of the Avater wheels, and 
sometimes the movement of steam pumps, through the whole night, while 
the poorer cultivators unceasingly ply the simple shadoof, or bucket-and- 
sweep, laboriously raising the water from trough to trough by as many as 
six or seven stages when the river is low. The bucket is of flexible leather, 
with a stiff rim, and is emptied into the trough, not by inverting it like a 
wooden bucket, but by putting the hand beneath and pushing the bottom 
up till the water all runs out over the brim, or, in other words, by turning 
the vessel inside out. 

The quantity of water thus withdrawn from the Nile is enormous. 
Most of this is evaporated directly from the surface or the superficial 
strata, but some moisture percolates down and oozes through the banks 
into the river again, while a larger quantity sinks till it joins the slow cur¬ 
rent of infiltration by which the Nile water pervades the earth of the 
valley to the distance, at some points, of not less than fifty miles. 

* “Forests,” “woods,” and “groves,” are very frequently mentioned 
in the Old Testament as existing at particular places, and they are often 
referred to by way of illustration, as familiar objects. “ Wood” is twice 
spoken of as a material in the New Testament, but otherwise—at least ac¬ 
cording to Cruden—not one of the above words occurs in that volume. 

This interesting fact, were other evidence wanting, would go far to 
prove that a great change had taken place in this respect between the 
periods when the Old Testament and the New were respectively com¬ 
posed ; for the scriptural writers, and the speakers introduced into their 
narratives, are remarkable for their frequent allusions to the natural 
objects and the social and industrial habits which characterized their ages 
and their country. 

Solomon anticipated Chevandier in the irrigation of forest trees: “1 
made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth 
trees.” —Ecclesiastes ii, 6. 

24 


370 


IRRIGATION IN IDUMA5A. 


eign and intestine war occasioned tlie neglect or destruction 
of these works—traces of which still meet the traveller’s eye at 
every step,—when the reservoirs were broken and the terrace 
walls had fallen down, there was no longer water for irrigation 
in summer, the rains of winter soon washed away most of the 
thin layer of earth upon the rocks, and Palestine was reduced 
almost to the condition of a desert. 

The course of events has been the same in Idumsea. The 
observing traveller discovers everywhere about Petra, partic¬ 
ularly if he enters the city by the route of Wadi Ksheibeh, 
very extensive traces of ancient cultivation, and upon the 
neighboring ridges are the ruins of numerous cisterns evidently 
constructed to furnish a supply of water for irrigation.* In 

* One of these, upon Mount Hor, two stories in height, is still in such 
preservation that I found not less than ten feet of water in it in the month 
of June, 1851. 

The brook Ain Musa, which runs through the city of Petra and finally 
disappears in the sands of Wadi el Araba, is a considerable river in winter, 
and the inhabitants of that town were obliged to excavate a tunnel through 
the rock near the right bank, just above the upper entrance of the Sik, to 
discharge a part of its swollen current. The sagacity of Dr. Kobinson 
detected the necessity of this measure, though the tunnel, the mouth of 
which was hidden by brushwood, was not discovered till some time after 
his visit. I even noticed unequivocal remains of a sluice by which the 
water was diverted to the tunnel near the arch that crosses the Sik. Im¬ 
mense labor was also expended in widening the natural channel at several 
points below the town, to prevent the damming up and setting back of the 
water—a fact I believe not hitherto noticed by travellers. 

The Fellahheen above Petra still employ the waters of Ain Musa for 
irrigation, and in summer the superficial current is wholly diverted from 
its natural channel for that purpose. At this season, the bed of the brook, 
which is composed of pebbles, gravel, and sand, is dry in the Sik and 
through the town; but the infiltration is such that water is generally 
found by digging to a small depth in the channel. Observing these facts 
in a visit to Petra in the summer, I was curious to know whether the sub¬ 
terranean waters escaped again to daylight, and I followed the ravine 
below the town for a long distance. Not very far from the upper entrance 
of the ravine, arborescent vegetation appeared upon its bottom, and as soon 
as the ground was well shaded, a thread of water burst out. This was 
joined by others a little lower down, and, at the distance of a mile from the 
town, a strong current was formed and ran down toward Wadi el Araba. 


METEOROLOGICAL EFFECTS OF IRRIGATION. 371 

primitive ages, tlie precipitation of winter in these hilly coun¬ 
tries was, in great part, retained for a time in the superficial 
soil, first by the vegetable mould of the forests, and then by 
the artificial arrangements I have described. The water im¬ 
bibed by the earth was partly taken up by direct evaporation, 
partly absorbed by vegetation, and partly carried down by 
infiltration to subjacent strata which gave it out in springs at 
lower levels, and thus a fertility of soil and a condition of the 
atmosphere were maintained sufficient to admit of the dense 
population that once inhabited those now arid wastes. At 
present, the rain water runs immediately off from the surface 
and is carried down to the sea, or is drunk up by the sands of 
the wadis, and the hillsides which once teemed with plenty 
are bare of vegetation, and seared by the scorching winds of 
the desert. 

In Southern Europe, in the Turkish Empire, and in many 
other countries, a very large proportion of the surface is, if not 
absolutely flooded, at least thoroughly moistened by irrigation, 
a great number of times in the course of every season, and this, 
especially, at periods when it would otherwise be cpiite dry, 
and when, too, the power of the sun and the capacity of the 
air for absorbing moisture are greatest. Hence it is obvious 
that the amount of evaporation from the earth in these coun¬ 
tries, and, of course, the humidity and the temperature of both 
the soil and the atmosphere in contact with it, must be much 
affected by the practice of irrigation. The cultivable area of 
Egypt, or the space accessible to cultivation, between desert 
and desert, is more than seven thousand square statute miles. 
Much of the surface, though not out of the reach of irrigation, 
lies too high to be economically watered, and irrigation and 
cultivation are therefore confined to an area of five or six thou¬ 
sand square miles, nearly the whole of which is regularly and 
constantly watered when not covered by the inundation, ex¬ 
cept in the short interval between the harvest and the rise of 
the waters. For nearly half of the year, then, irrigation adds 
five or six thousand square miles, or more than a square equa¬ 
torial degree, to the evaporable surface of the Nile valley, or. 


372 


METEOROLOGICAL EFFECTS OF IRRIGATION. 


in other words, more than decuples the area from which an 
appreciable quantity of moisture would otherwise be evap¬ 
orated ; for after the Nile has retired within its banks, its 
waters by no means cover one tenth of the space just men¬ 
tioned.* The fresh-water canals now constructing, in connec- 

* The authorities differ as to the extent of the cultivable and the culti¬ 
vated soil of Egypt. Lippincott’s, or rather Thomas and Baldwin’s, Gaz¬ 
etteer —a work of careful research—estimates “ the whole area comprised 
in the valley [below the first cataract] and delta,” at 11,000 square miles. 
Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible , article “ Egypt,” says: “ Egypt has a 
superficies of about 9,582 square geographical miles of soil, which the Nile 
either does or can water and fertilize. This computation includes the 
river and lakes as well as sundry tracts which can be inundated, and the 
whole space either cultivated or fit for cultivation is no more than about 
5,626 square miles.” By geographical mile is here meant, I suppose, the 
nautical mile of sixty to an equatorial degree, or about 2,025 yards. The 
whole area, then, by this estimate, is 12,682 square statute or English 
miles, that of the space “ cultivated or fit for cultivation,” 7,447. Smith’s 
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography , article “^Egyptus,” gives 
2,255 square miles as the area of the valley between Syene and the bifur¬ 
cation of the Nile, exclusive of the Fayoom, which is estimated at 340. 
The area of the Delta is stated at 1,976 square miles between the main 
branches of the river, and, including the irrigated lands east and west of 
those branches, at 4,500 square miles. This latter work does not inform us 
whether these are statute or nautical miles, but nautical miles must be 
intended. 

Other writers give estimates differing considerably from those just 
cited. The latest computations I have seen are those in the first volume 
of Kremer’s BEgypten, 1863. This author (pp. 6, 7) assigns to the Delta an 
area of 200 square German geographical miles (fifteen to the degree); to all 
Lower Egypt, including, of course, the Delta, 400 such miles. These num¬ 
bers are equal, respectively, to 4,239 and 8,478 square statute miles, and 
the great lagoons are embraced in the areas computed. Upper Egypt 
(above‘Cairo) is said (p. 11) to contain 4,000,000 feddan of culturf dche , or 
cultivable land. The feddan is stated (p. 37) to contain 7,333 square piks, 
the pik being 75 centimetres, and it therefore corresponds almost exactly 
to the English acre. Hence, according to Kremer, the cultivable soil of 
Upper Egypt is 6,250 square statute miles, or twice as much as the whole 
area of the valley between Syene and the bifurcation of the Nile, accord¬ 
ing to Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography . I suspect that 
4,000,000 feddan is erroneously given as the cultivable area of Upper 
Egypt alone, when in fact it should be taken for the arable surface of both 


IRRIGATION IN EGYPT. 


373 


tion with the works for the Suez canal, will not only restore 
the long abandoned fields east of the Nile, hut add to the arable 
soil of Egypt hundreds of square miles of newly reclaimed 
desert, and thus still further increase the climatic effects of 
irrigation.* 

The Nile receives not a single tributary in its course through 
Egypt; there is not so much as one living spring in the whole 
land,f and, with the exception of a narrow strip of coast, where 
the annual precipitation is said to amount to six inches, the 
fall of rain in the territory of the Pharaohs is not two inches 
in the year. The subsoil of the wdiole valley is pervaded with 
moisture by infiltration from the Nile, and water can every¬ 
where be found at the depth of a few feet. Were irrigation 
suspended, and Egypt abandoned, as in that case it must be, 

Lower and Upper Egypt; for from the statistical tables in the same vol¬ 
ume, it appears that 3,317,125 feddan, or 5,253 square statute miles, were 
cultivated, in both geographical divisions, in the year referred to in the 
tables, the date of which is not stated. 

The area which the Nile would now cover at high water, if left to itself, 
is greater than in ancient times, because the bed of the river has been ele¬ 
vated, and consequently the lateral spread of the inundation increased. See 
Smith’s Dictionary of Geography, article “ iEgyptus.” But the industry 
of the Egyptians in the days of the Pharaohs and the Ptolomies carried 
the Nile-water to large provinces which have now been long abandoned 
and have relapsed into the condition of a desert. “ Anciently,” observes 
the writer of the article “Egypt” in Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible , 
“2,735 square miles more [about 3,700 square statute miles] may have 
been cultivated. In the best days of Egypt, probably all the land was 
cultivated that could be made available for agricultural purposes, and 
hence we may estimate the ancient arable area of that country at not less 
than 11,000 square statute miles, or fully double its present extent.” 

* A canal has been constructed, and new ones are in progress, to con¬ 
vey water from the Nile to the city of Suez, and to various points on the 
line of the ship canal, with the double purpose of supplying fresh water to 
the inhabitants and laborers, and of irrigating the adjacent soil. The area 
of land which may be thus reclaimed and fertilized is very large, but the 
actual quantity which it will be found economically expedient to bring 
under cultivation cannot now be determined. 

t The so-called spring at Heliopolis is only a thread of water infiltrated 
from the Nile or the canals. 


374 


IRRIGATION IN EGYPT. 


to the operations of nature, there is no doubt that trees, the 
roots of which penetrate deeply, would in time establish them¬ 
selves on the deserted soil, fill the valley with verdure, and 
perhaps at last temper the climate, and even call down abun¬ 
dant rain from the heavens.* But the immediate effect of 
discontinuing irrigation would be, first, an immense reduction 
of the evaporation from the valley in the dry season, and then 
a greatly augmented dryness and heat of the atmosphere. 
Even the almost constant north wind—the strength of which 
would be increased in consequence of these changes—would 
little reduce the temperature of the narrow cleft between the 
burning mountains which hem in the channel of the Nile, so 
that a single year would transform the most fertile of soils to 
the most barren of deserts, and render uninhabitable a terri¬ 
tory that irrigation makes capable of sustaining as dense a 
population as has ever existed in any part of the world.f 
Whether man found the valley of the Nile a forest, or such a 
waste as I have just described, we do not historically know. 
In either case, he has not simply converted a wilderness into 

* The date and the doum palm, the sont and many other acacias, the 
caroub, the sycamore, and other trees, grow well in Egypt without irri¬ 
gation, and would doubtless spread through the entire valley in a few 
years. 

t Wilkinson has shown that the cultivable soil of Egypt has not been 
diminished by encroachment of the desert sands, or otherwise, but that, on 
the contrary, it must have been increased since the age of the Pharaohs. 
The Gotha Almanac, for 1862 states the population of Egypt in 1859 at 
5,125,000 souls; but this must be a great exaggeration, even supposing the 
estimate to include the inhabitants of Nubia, and of much other territory 
not geographically belonging to Egypt. In general, the population of that 
country has been estimated at something more than three millions, or 
about six hundred to the square mile ; but with a better government and 
better social institutions, the soil would sustain a much greater number, 
and in fact it is believed that in ancient times its inhabitants were twice, 
perhaps even thrice, as numerous as at present. 

Wilkinson (Handbook for Travellers in Egypt, p. 10) observes that the 
total population, which two hundred years ago was estimated at 4,000,000, 
amounted till lately only to about 1,800,000 souls, having been reduced 
since 1800 from 2,500,000 to that number. 


QUANTITY OF WATER APPLIED. 375 

a garden, but lias unquestionably produced extensive climatic 
cliange.* 

The fields of Egypt are more regularly watered than those 
of any other country bordering on the Mediterranean, except 
the rice grounds in Italy, and perhaps the mcvrcite or winter 
meadows of Lombardy; but irrigation is more or less employed 
throughout almost the entire basin of that sea, and is every¬ 
where attended with effects which, if less in degree, are anal¬ 
ogous in character to those resulting from it in Egypt. In 
general, it may be said that the soil is nowhere artificially 
watered except when it is so dry that little moisture would be 
evaporated from it, and, consequently, every acre of irrigated 
ground is so much added to the evaporable surface of the 
country. When the supply of water is unlimited, it is allowed, 
after serving its purpose on one field, to run into drains, canals, 
or rivers. But in most regions where irrigation is regularly 
employed, it is necessary to economize the water; after pass¬ 
ing over or through one parcel of ground, it is conducted to 

* Ritter supposes Egypt to have been a sandy desert when it was first 
occupied by man. “ The first inhabitant of the sandy valley of the Nile was 
a desert dweller, as his neighbors right and left, the Libyan, the nomade 
Arab, still are. But the civilized people of Egypt transformed, by canals, 
the waste into the richest granary of the world ; they liberated themselves 
from the shackles of the rock and sand desert, in the midst of which, by a 
wise distribution of the fluid through the solid geographical form, by irri¬ 
gation in short, they created a region of culture most rich iu historical 
monuments .”—Einleitung zur allgemeinen vergleichenden Geographie, pp. 
165, 166. 

This view seems to me highly improbable; for though, by canals and 
embankments, man has done much to modify the natural distribution of 
the waters of the Nile, and possibly has even transferred its channel from 
one side of the valley to the other, yet the annual inundation is not his 
work, and the river must have overflowed its banks and carried spon¬ 
taneous vegetation wfith its waters, as well before as since Egypt was first 
occupied by the human family. There is, indeed, some reason to suppose 
that man lived upon the banks of the Nile when its channel was much 
lower, and the spread of its inundations much narrower than at present; 
but wherever its flood reached, there the forest would propagate itself, 
and its shores are much more likely to have been morasses than sands. 


876 


EXTENT OF LANDS IEEIGATED. 


another; no more is withdrawn from the canals at any one 
point than is absorbed by the soil it irrigates, or evaporated 
from it, and, consequently, it is not restored to liquid circula¬ 
tion, except by infiltration or precipitation. We are safe, then, 
in saying that the humidity evaporated from any artificially 
watered soil is increased by a quantity bearing a large propor¬ 
tion to the whole amount distributed over it; for most even 
of that which is absorbed by the earth is immediately given 
out again either by vegetables or by evaporation. 

It is not easy to ascertain precisely either the extent of sur¬ 
face thus watered, or the amount of water supplied, in any 
given country, because these quantities vary with the character 
of the season; but there are not many districts in Southern Eu¬ 
rope where the management of the arrangements for irrigation 
is not one of the most important branches of agricultural labor. 
The eminent engineer Lombardini describes the system of irri¬ 
gation in Lombardy as, “ every day in summer, diffusing 
over 550,000 hectares of land 45,000,000 cubic metres of water, 
which is equal to the entire volume of the Seine, at an ordi¬ 
nary flood, or a rise of three metres above the hydrometer at 
the bridge of La Tournelle at Paris.” * Kiel states the quan¬ 
tity of land irrigated in the former kingdom of Sardinia, includ¬ 
ing Savoy, in 1856, at 240,000 hectares, or not much less than 
600,000 acres. This is about four thirteenths of the cultivable 
soil of the kingdom. According to the same author, the irri¬ 
gated lands in France did not exceed 100,000 hectares, or 
247,000 acres, while those in Lombardy amounted to 450,000 
hectares, more than 1,100,000 acres.f In these three states 
alone, then, there were more than three thousand square miles 
of artificially watered land, and if we add the irrigated soils 
of the rest of Italy, of the Mediterranean islands, of the Span¬ 
ish peninsula, of Turkey in Europe and in Asia Minor, of 
Syria, of Egypt and the remainder of Northern Africa, we 
shall see that irrigation increases the evaporable surface of the 

* Memorie sui progetti per V extensions delV Irrigazione , etc., il Politec- 
nico, for January, 1863, p. 6. 

t Niel, VAgriculture des Mats Sardes , p. 232. 


QUANTITY OF WATER APPLIED. 


377 


Mediterranean basin by a quantity bearing no inconsiderable 
proportion to the area naturally covered by water within it. 
As near as can be ascertained, the amount of water applied 
to irrigated lands is scarcely anywhere less than the total pre¬ 
cipitation during the season of vegetable growth, and in gen-. 
eral it much exceeds that quantity. In grass grounds and in 
field culture it ranges from 27 or 28 to 60 inches, while in 
smaller crops, tilled by hand labor, it is sometimes carried as 
high as 300 inches.* The rice grounds and the marcite of 

* Niel, Agriculture des Mats Sardes , p. 237. Lombardini’s compu¬ 
tation just given allows eighty-one cubic metres per day to the hectare, 
which, supposing the season of irrigation to be one hundred days, is equal 
to a precipitation of thirty-two inches. But in Lombardy, water is applied 
to most crops during a longer period than one hundred days; and in the 
marcite it flows over the ground even in winter. 

According to Boussingault (Economie Rurale , ii, p. 246) grass grounds 
ought to receive, in Germany, twenty-one centimetres of water per week, 
and with less than half that quantity it is not advisable to incur the expense 
of supplying it. The ground is irrigated twenty-five or thirty times, and 
if the full quantity of twenty-one centimetres is applied, it receives about 
two hundred inches of water, or six times the total amount of precipitation. 
Puvis, quoted by Boussingault, after much research comes to the conclu¬ 
sion that a proper quantity is twenty centimetres applied twenty-five or 
thirty times, which corresponds with the estimate just stated. Puvis 
adds— a nd, as our author thinks, with reason—that this amount might be 
doubled without disadvantage. 

Boussingault observes that rain water is vastly more fertilizing than the 
water of irrigating canals, and therefore the supply of the latter must be 
greater. This is explained partly by the different character of the sub¬ 
stances held in solution or suspension by the waters of the earth and of the 
sky, partly by the higher temperature of the latter, and, possibly, partly 
also by the mode of application—the rain being finely divided in its fall or 
by striking plants on the ground, river water flowing in a continuous sheet. 

The temperature of the water is thought even more important than its 
composition. The sources which irrigate the marcite of Lombardy— 
meadows so fertile that less than an acre furnishes grass for a cow the 
whole year—are very warm. The ground watered by them never freezes, 
and a first crop, for soiling, is cut from it in January or February. The 
Canal Cavour, just now commenced—which is to take its supply from the 
Po at Chivasso, fourteen or fifteen mile3 below Turin—will furnish water 
of much higher fertilizing power than that derived from the Dora Baltea 


378 


EFFECTS OF IRRIGATION. 


Lombardy are not included in these estimates of the amount 
of water applied. Arrangements are concluded, and new 
plans proposed, for an immense increase of the lands fertilized 
by irrigation in France and Italy, and there is every reason to 
believe that the artificially watered soil of the latter country 
will be doubled, that of France quadrupled, before the end of 
this century. There can be no doubt that by these operations 
man is exercising a powerful influence on soil, on vegetable 
and animal life, and on climate, and hence that in this, as 
in many other fields of industry, he is truly a geographical 
agency.* 

and the Sesia, both because it is warmer, and because it transports a more 
abundant and a richer sediment than the latter streams, which are fed by 
Alpine icefields and melting snows, and which flow, for long distances, in 
channels ground smooth and bare by ancient glaciers, and not now con¬ 
tributing much earth or fine slime to their waters. 

* It belongs rather to agriculture than to geography to discuss the 
quality of the crops obtained by irrigation, or the permanent effects pro¬ 
duced by it on the productiveness of the soil. There is no doubt, how¬ 
ever, that all crops which can be raised without watering are superior in 
flavor and in nutritive power to those grown by the aid of irrigation. 
Garden vegetables, particularly, profusely watered, are so insipid as to be 
hardly eatable. Wherever irrigation is practised, there is an almost irre¬ 
sistible tendency, especially among ignorant cultivators, to carry it to 
excess; and in Piedmont and Lombardy, if the supply of water is abundant, 
it is so liberally applied as sometimes not only to injure the quality of the 
product, but to drown the plants and diminish the actual weight of 
the crop. 

Professor Liebig, in his Modern Agriculture , says: “ There is not to be 
found in chemistry a more wonderful phenomenon, one which more con¬ 
founds all human wisdom, than is presented by the soil of a garden or field. 
By the simplest experiment, any one may satisfy himself that rain water 
filtered through field or garden soil does not dissolve out a trace of potash, 
silicic acid, ammonia, or phosphoric acid. The soil does not give up to the 
water one particle of the food of plants which it contains. The most con¬ 
tinuous rains cannot remove from the field, except mechanically, any of 
the essential constituents of its fertility.” 

“ The soil not only retains firmly all the food of plants which is actually 
in it, but its power to preserve all that may be useful to them extends 
much farther. If rain or other water holding in solution ammonia, potash, 
and phosphoric and silicic acids, be brought in contact with soil, these sub- 


WATER WITHDRAWN FOR IRRIGATION. 


379 


The quantity of water artificially withdrawn from running 
streams for the purpose of irrigation is such as very sensibly 
to affect their volume, and it is, therefore, an important ele¬ 
ment in the geography of rivers. Brooks of no trifling current 

stances disappear almost immediately from the solution; the soil with¬ 
draws them from the water. Only such substances are completely with¬ 
drawn by the soil as are indispensable articles of food for plants; all others 
remain wholly or in part in solution.” 

The first of the paragraphs just quoted is not in accordance with the 
alleged experience of agriculturists in those parts of Italy where irrigation 
is most successfully applied. They believe that the constituents of vege¬ 
table growth are washed out of the soil by excessive and long-continued 
watering., They consider it also established as a fact of observation, that 
water which has flowed through or over rich ground is far more valuable 
for irrigation than water from the same source, which has not been im¬ 
pregnated with fertilizing substances by passing through soils containing 
them; and, on the other hand, that water, rich in the elements of vege¬ 
tation, parts with them in serving to irrigate a poor soil, and is therefore 
less valuable as a fertilizer of lower grounds to which it may afterward be 
conducted. 

The practice of irrigation—except in mountainous countries where 
springs and rivulets are numerous—is attended with very serious econo¬ 
mical, social, and political evils. The construction of canals and their 
immensely ramified branches, and the grading and scarping of the ground 
to be watered, are always expensive operations, and they very often require 
an amount of capital which can be commanded only by the state, by 
moneyed corporations, or by very wealthy proprietors; the capacity of 
the canals must be calculated with reference to the area intended to be 
irrigated, and when they and their branches are once constructed, it is 
very difficult to extend them, or to accommodate any of their original ar¬ 
rangements to changes in the condition of the soil, or in the modes or 
objects of cultivation; the flow of the water being limited by the abun¬ 
dance of the source or the capacity of the canals, the individual proprietor 
cannot be allowed to withdraw water at will, according to his own private 
interest or convenience, but both the time and the quantity of supply must 
be regulated by a general system applicable, as far as may be, to the whole 
area irrigated by the same canal, and every cultivator must conform his 
industry to a plan which may be quite at variance with his special objects 
or with his views of good husbandry. The clashing interests and the 
jealousies of proprietors depending on the same means of supply are a 
source of incessant contention and litigation, and the caprices or partial¬ 
ities of the officers who control, or of contractors who farm the canala, 



380 


WATER WITHDRAWN FOR IRRIGATION. 


are often wholly diverted from tlieir natural channels to sup¬ 
ply the canals, and their entire mass of water completely 
absorbed, so that it does not reach the river which it naturally 
feeds, except in such proportion as it is conveyed to it by infil¬ 
tration. Irrigation, therefore, diminishes great rivers in warm 
countries by cutting off their sources of supply as well as by 
direct abstraction of water from their channels. We have just 
seen that the system of irrigation in Lombardy deprives the 
Po of a quantity of water equal to the total delivery of the 
Seine at ordinary flood, or, in other words, of the equivalent 
of a tributary navigable for hundreds of miles by vessels of 
considerable burden. The new canals commenced and pro¬ 
jected will greatly increase the loss. The water required for 
irrigation in Egypt is less than would be supposed from the 
exceeding rapidity of evaporation in that arid climate ; for the 
soil is thoroughly saturated during the inundation, and infil¬ 
tration from the Nile continues to supply a considerable 
amount of humidity in the dryest season. Lin ant Bey com¬ 
puted that twenty-nine cubic metres per day sufficed to irri¬ 
gate a hectare in the Delta.* This is equivalent to a fall of 
rain of two millimetres and nine tenths per day, or, if we sup¬ 
pose water to be applied for one hundred and fifty days during 
the dry seasons, to a total precipitation of 435 millimetres, 
about seventeen inches and one third. Taking the area of 
actually cultivated soil in Egypt at the low estimate of 
3,600,000 acres, and the average amount of water daily applied 

lead not unfrequently to ruinous injustice toward individual landholders. 
These circumstances discourage the division of the soil into small proper¬ 
ties, and there is a constant tendency to the accumulation of large estates 
of irrigated land in the hands of great capitalists, and consequently to the 
dispossession of the small cultivators, who pass from the condition of 
owners of the land to that of hireling tillers. The farmers are no longer 
yeomen, but peasants. Having no interest in the soil which composes 
their country, they are virtually expatriated, and the middle class, which 
ought to constitute the real physical and moral strength of the land, ceases 
to exist as a rural estate, and is found only among the professional, the 
mercantile, and the industrial population of the cities. 

* Boussingault, Economic Rurale y ii, pp. 248 , 249 . 


EFFECTS OF IRRIGATION ON HEALTH. 


381 


in both Upper and Lower Egypt at twelve hundredths of an 
inch in depth, we have an abstraction of 61,000,000 cnbic 
yards, which—the mean daily delivery of the Nile being in 
ronnd numbers 320,000,000 cubic yards—is nearly one fifth 
of the average quantity of water contributed to the Mediter¬ 
ranean by that river. 

Irrigation, as employed for certain special purposes, in 
Europe and America, is productive of very prejudicial climatic 
effects. I refer particularly to the cultivation of rice in the 
Slave States of the American Union and in Italy. The climate 
of the Southern States is not necessarily unhealthy for the 
white m^n, but he can scarcely sleep a single night in the 
vicinity of the rice grounds without being attacked by a dan¬ 
gerous fever.* The neighborhood of the rice fields is less 
pestilential in Lombardy and Piedmont than in South Caro¬ 
lina and Georgia, but still very insalubrious to both man and 
beast. “ Not only does the population decrease where rice is 
grown,” says Escourrou Milliago, “ but even the flocks are 
attacked by typhus. In the rice grounds, the soil is divided 
into compartments rising in gradual succession to the level of 
the irrigating canal, in order that the water, after having 
flowed one field, may be drawn off to another, and thus a 
single current serve for several compartments, the lowest field, 
of course, still being higher than the ditch which at last drains 
both it and the adjacent soil. This arrangement gives a cer- 

* The cultivation of rice is so prejudicial to health everywhere that 
nothing but the necessities of a dense population can justify the sacrifice 
of life it costs in countries where it is pursued. 

It has been demonstrated by actual experiment, that even in Missis¬ 
sippi, cotton can be advantageously raised by the white man without 
danger to health ; and in fact, a great deal of the cotton brought to the 
Vicksburg market for some years past has been grown exclusively by 
white labor. There is no reason why the cultivation of cotton should be 
a more unhealthy occupation in America than it is in other countries 
where it was never dreamed of as dangerous, and no well-informed 
American, in the Slave States or out of them, believes that the abolition 
of slavery in the South would permanently diminish the cotton crop of 
those States. 


382 


SALINE DEPOSITS FROM IRRIGATION. 


tain force of h} r drostatic pressure to tlie water witli which the 
rice is irrigated, and the infiltration from these fields is said to 
extend through neighboring grounds, sometimes to the distance 
of not less than a myriametre, or six English miles, and to he 
destructive to crops and even trees reached by it. Land thus 
affected can no longer he employed for any purpose hut grow¬ 
ing rice, and when prepared for that crop, it propagates still 
further the evils under which it had itself suffered, and, of 
course, the mischief is a growing one.” * 

The attentive traveller in Egypt and Nubia cannot fail to 
notice many localities, generally of small extent, where the 
soil is rendered infertile by an excess of saline matter in its 
composition. In many cases, perhaps in all, these barren spots 
lie rather above the level usually flooded by the inundations 
of the Nile, and yet they exhibit traces of former cultivation. 
Recent observations in India, a notice of which I find in an 
account of a meeting of the Asiatic Society in the Athenaeum 
of December 20,1862, No. 1834, suggest a possible explanation 
of this fact. At this meeting, Professor Medlicott read an essay 
on “ the saline efflorescence called £ Reh 5 and 6 Kuller,’ ” 
which is gradually invading many of the most fertile districts 
of Northern and Western India, and changing them into sterile 
deserts. It consists principally of sulphate of soda (Glauber’s 
salts), with varying proportions of common salt. Mr. Medli¬ 
cott pronounces “ these salts (which, in small quantities are 
favorable to fertility of soil) to be the gradual result of concen¬ 
tration by evaporation of river and canal waters, which contain 
them in very minute quantities, and with which the lands are 
either irrigated or occasionally overflowed.” The river inun¬ 
dations in hot countries usually take place but once in a year, 
and, though the banks remain submerged for days or even 
weeks, the water at that period, being derived principally from 
rains and snows, must be less highly charged with mineral 
matter than at lower stages, and besides, it is always in mo¬ 
tion. The water of irrigation, on the other hand, is applied 


* VItalic & propos de VExposition de Paris, p. 92. 


INUNDATIONS AND TORRENTS. 


383 


for many months in succession, it is drawn from rivers at the 
seasons when their proportion of salts is greatest, and it either 
sinks into the superficial soil, carrying with it the saline sub¬ 
stances it holds in solution, or is evaporated from the surface, 
leaving them upon it. Hence irrigation must impart to the 
soil more salts than natural inundation. The sterilized 
grounds in Egypt and Nubia lying above the reach of the 
floods, as I have said, we may suppose them to have been first 
cultivated in that remote antiquity when the Nile valley re¬ 
ceived its earliest inhabitants. They must have been artifi¬ 
cially irrigated from the beginning; they may have been 
under cultivation many centuries before the soil at a lower 
level was invaded by man, and hence it is natural that they 
should be more strongly impregnated with saline matter than 
fields which are exposed every year, for some weeks, to the 
action of running water so nearly pure that it would be more 
likely to dissolve salts than to deposit them. 

INUNDATIONS AND TORRENTS. 

In pointing out in a former chapter the evils which have 
resulted from the too extensive destruction of the forests, I 
dwelt at some length on the increased violence of river inun¬ 
dations, and especially on the devastations of torrents, in coun¬ 
tries improvidently deprived of their woods, and I spoke of 
the replanting of the forests as the only effectual method of 
preventing the frequent recurrence of disastrous floods. There 
are many regions where, from the loss of the superficial soil, 
from financial considerations, and from other causes, the res¬ 
toration of the woods is not, under present circumstances, to 
be hoped for. Even where that measure is feasible, and in 
actual process of execution, a great number of years must 
elapse before the action of the destructive causes in question 
can be arrested or perhaps even sensibly mitigated by it. Be¬ 
sides this, leaving out of view the objections urged by Bel- 
grand and his followers to the generally received opinions 
concerning the beneficial influence of the forest as respects 


384 


RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 


river inundations—for no one disputes its importance in pre¬ 
venting the formation and limiting the ravages of mountain 
torrents—floods will always occur in years of excessive precip¬ 
itation, whether the surface of the soil be generally cleared or 
generally wooded. 

Physical improvement in this respect, then, cannot be con¬ 
fined to preventive measures, but, in countries subject to dam¬ 
age by inundation, means must be contrived to obviate dangers 
and diminish injuries to which human life and all the works 
of human industry will occasionally be exposed, in spite of 
every effort to lessen the frequency of their recurrence by 
acting directly on the causes that produce them. As every 
civilized country is, in some degree, subject to inundation by 
the overflow^ of rivers, the evil is a familiar one, and needs no 
general description. In discussing this branch of the subject, 
therefore, I may confine myself chiefly to the means that have 
been or may be employed to resist the force and limit the 
ravages of floods, w T hich, left wholly unrestrained, would not 
only inflict immense injury upon the material interests of man, 
but produce geographical revolutions of no little magnitude. 


a. River Embankments. 

The most obvious and doubtless earliest method of pre¬ 
venting the escape of river waters from their natural channels, 
and the overflow of fields and towns by their spread, is that of 
raised embankments along their course. The necessity of such 
embankments usually arises from the gradual elevation of the 
bed of running streams in consequence of the deposit of the 
earth and gravel they are charged with in high water; and, as 
we have seen, this elevation is rapidly accelerated when the 
highlands around the headwaters of rivers are cleared of their 
forests. When a river is embanked at a given point, and, con¬ 
sequently, the water of its floods, which would otherwise 
spread over a wide surface, is confined within narrow limits, 
the velocity of the current and its transporting power are aug¬ 
mented, and its burden of sand and gravel is deposited at some 


RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 


385 


lower point, where the rapidity of its flow is checked by a 
diminution in the inclination of the bed, by a wider channel, 
or finally by a lacustrine or marine basin which receives its 
waters. Wherever it lets fall solid material, its channel is 
raised in consequence, and the declivity of the whole bed 
between the head of the embankment and the slack of the 
stream is reduced. Hence the current, at first accelerated by 
confinement, is afterward checked by the mechanical resist¬ 
ance of the matter deposited, and by the diminished inclina¬ 
tion of its channel, and then begins again to let fall the earth 
it holds in suspension, and to raise its bed at the point where 
its overflow had been before prevented by embankment. The 
bank must now be raised in proportion, and these processes 
would be repeated and repeated indefinitely, had not nature 
provided a remedy in floods, which sweep out recent deposits, 
burst the bonds of the river and overwhelm the adjacent coun¬ 
try with final desolation, or divert the current into a new 
channel, destined to become, in its turn, the scene of a similar 
struggle between man and the waters. 

Few rivers, like the Nile, more than compensate by the 
fertilizing properties of their water and their slime for the 
damage they may do in inundations, and, consequently, there 
are few whose floods are not an object of dread, few whose 
encroachments upon their banks are not a source of constant 
anxiety and expense to the proprietors of the lands through 
which they flow. River dikes, for confining the spread of 
currents at high water, are of great antiquity in the East, and 
those of the Po and its tributaries were begun before we have 
any trustworthy physical or political annals of the provinces 
upon their borders. From the earliest ages, the Italian hy¬ 
draulic engineers have stood in the front rank of their profes¬ 
sion, and the Italian literature of this branch of material im¬ 
provement is exceedingly voluminous. But the countries for 
which I write have no rivers like the Po, no plains like those 
of Lombardy, and the dangers to which the inhabitants of 
English and American river banks are exposed are more nearly 
analogous to those that threaten the soil and population in the 
25 


386 


FLOODS OF THE AKDECHE. 


valleys and plains of France, than to the perils and losses of 
the Lombard. The writings of the Italian hydrographers, too, 
though* rich in professional instruction, are less accessible to 
foreigners and less adapted to popular use than those of French 
engineers.* For these reasons I shall take my citations prin¬ 
cipally from French authorities, though I shall occasionally 
* allude to Italian writers on the floods of the Tiber, of the Arno, 
and some other Italian streams which much resemble those of 
the rivers of England and the United States. 

b. Floods of the Ardeche. 

The floods of mountain streams are attended with greater 
immediate danger to life and property than those of rivers of 
less rapid flow, because their currents are more impetuous, and 
they rise more suddenly and with less previous warning. At 
the same time, their ravages are confined within narrower 
limits, the waters retire sooner to their accustomed channel, 
and the danger is more quickly over, than in the case of inun¬ 
dations of larger rivers. The Ardeche, which has given its 
name to a department in France, drains a basin of 600,238 
acres, or a little less than nine hundred and thirty-eight square 
miles. Its remotest source is about seventy-five miles, in a 
straight line, from its junction with the Rhone, and springs at 
an elevation of four thousand feet above that point. At the 
lowest stage of the river, the bed of the Chassezac, its largest 
and longest tributary, is in many places completely dry on the 

* The very valuable memoirs of Lombardini, Cenni idrograji sulla 
Lombardia , Intorno al sistema idraulico del Po, and other papers on simi¬ 
lar subjects, were published in periodicals little known out of Italy; and the 
Idraulica Pratica of Mari has not, I believe, been translated into French 
or English. These works, and other sources of information equally inac¬ 
cessible out of Italy, have been freely used by Baumgarten, in a memoir 
entitled Notice sur les Rivieres de la Lombardie , in the Annates des Pouts 
et Chaussees , 1847, ler s6mestre, pp. 129 et seqq., and by Dumont, Des 
Travaux Publics dans leurs Rapports avec VAgriculture, note, viii, pp. 269 
et seqq. For the convenience of my readers, I shall use these two articles 
instead of the original authorities on which they are founded. 


FLOODS OF THE ARDFCHE. 


387 


surface—tlie water being sufficient only to supply the subter¬ 
ranean channels of infiltration—and the Ardeche itself is 
almost everywhere fordable, even below the mouth of the 
Chassezac. But in floods, the river has sometimes risen more 
than sixty feet at the Pont d’Arc, a natural arch of two hun¬ 
dred feet chord, which spans the stream below its junction 
with all its important affluents. At the height of the inunda¬ 
tion of 1827, the quantity of water passing this point—after 
deducting thirty per cent, for material transported with the 
current and for irregularity of flow—was estimated at 8,845 
cubic yards to the second, and between twelve o’clock on the 
10th of September of that year and ten o’clock the next 
morning, the water discharged through the passage in question 
amounted to more than 450,000,000 cubic yards. This quan¬ 
tity, distributed equally through the basin of the river, would 
cover its entire area to a depth of more than five inches. 

The Ardeche rises so suddenly that, in the inundation of 
1846, the women who were washing in the bed of the river 
had not time to save their linen, and barely escaped with their 
lives, though they instantly fled upon hearing the roar of the 
approaching flood. Its waters and those of its affluents fall 
almost as rapidly, for in less than twenty-four hours after the 
rain has ceased in the Cevennes, where it rises, the Ardeche 
returns within its ordinary channel, even at its junction with 
the Phone. In the flood of 1772, the water at La Beaume de 
Buoms, on the Beaume, a tributary of the Ardeche, rose thirty- 
five feet above low water, but the stream was again fordable 
on the evening of the same day. The inundation of 1827 was, 
in this respect, exceptional, for it continued three days, during 
which period the Ardeche poured into the Phone 1,305,000,000 
cubic yards of water. 

The Pile delivers into the sea 101,000 cubic feet or 3,741 
cubic yards per second, on an average of the whole year.* 

* Sir John F. W. Herschel, citing Talabot as his authority, Physical 
Geography (24). 

In an elaborate paper on “Irrigation,” printed in the United States 
Patent Report for 1860, p. 169, it is stated that the volume of water poured 


388 


FLOODS OF THE AEDECHE. 


This is equal to 323,222,400 cubic yards per day. In a single 
day of flood, then, the Ardeche, a river too insignificant to be 
known except in the local topography of France, contributes 
to the Rhone once and a half, and for three consecutive days 
once and one third, as much as the average delivery of the 
Nile during the same periods, though the basin of the latter 
river contains 500,000 square miles of surface, or more than 
five hundred times as much as that of the former. 

The average annual precipitation in the basin of the Ar¬ 
deche is not greater than in many other parts of Europe, but 
excessive quantities of rain frequently fall in that valley in the 
autumn. On the 9th of October, 1827, there fell at Joyeuse, 
on the Beaume, no less than thirty-one inches between three 
o’clock in the morning and midnight. Such facts as this ex¬ 
plain the extraordinary suddenness and violence of the floods 
of the Ardeche, and the basins of many other tributaries of 
the Rhone exhibit meteorological phenomena not less remark¬ 
able.* The inundation of the 10th September, 1857, was 
accompanied with a terrific hurricane, which passed along the 

into the Mediterranean by the Mile in twenty-four hours, at low water, is 
150,566,392,368 cubic metres; at high water, 705,514,667,440 cubic metres. 
Taking the mean of these two numbers, the average daily delivery of the 
Mile would be 428,081,059,808 cubic metres, or more than 550,000,000,000 
cubic yards. There is some enormous mistake, probably a typographical 
error, in this statement, which makes the delivery of the Mile seventeen 
hundred times as great as computed by Talabot, and many times more 
than any physical geographer has ever estimated the quantity supplied by 
all the rivers on the face of the globe. 

* The Drac, a torrent emptying into the Is£re a little below Grenoble, 
has discharged 5,200, the Is&re, which receives it, 7,800 cubic yards, and 
the Durance an equal quantity, per second.— Montluisant, Note sur les 
JDessechements , etc ., Annales des Fonts et Chaussees , 1833, 2me semestre, 

p. 288. 

The floods of some other French rivers scarcely fall behind those of the 
Rhone. The Loire, above Roanne, has a basin of 2,471 square miles, or 
about twice and a half the area of that of the Ardeche. In some of its 
inundations it has delivered above 9,500 cubic yards per second.— Bel- 
grand, Be VInfluence des Forets , etc., Annales des Fonts et Chaussees , 1854, 
ler sSmestre, p. 15, note. 


FLOODS OF THE ARDECHE. 


389 


eastern elope of the high grounds where the Ardeche and sev¬ 
eral other western affluents of the Rhone take their rise. The 
wind tore up all the trees in its path, and the rushing torrents 
Lore their trunks down to the larger streams, whicli again trans¬ 
ported them to the Rhone in such rafts that one might al¬ 
most have crossed that river by stepping from trunk to trunk.* 
The Rhone, therefore, is naturally subject to great and sudden 
inundations, and the same remark may he applied to most of 
the principal rivers of France, because the geographical char¬ 
acter of all of them is approximately the same. 

The height and violence of the inundations of most great 
rivers are determined by the degree in which the floods of the 
different tributaries are coincident in time. Were all the afflu¬ 
ents of the Rhone to pour their highest annual floods into its 
channel at once, were a dozen Riles to empty themselves into 
its bed at the same moment, its water would rise to a height 
and rush with an impetus that would sweep into the Mediter¬ 
ranean the entire population of its banks, and all the works 
that man has erected upon the plains which border it. But 
such a coincidence can never happen. The tributaries of this 
river run in very different directions, and some of them are 
swollen principally by the melting of the snows about their 
sources, others almost exclusively by heavy rains. When a 
damp southeast wind blows up the valley of the Ardeche, its 
moisture is condensed, and precipitated in a deluge upon the 
mountains which embosom the headwaters of that stream, 
thus producing a flood, while a neighboring basin, the axis of 


* The original forests in which the basin of the Arcteche was rich have 
been rapidly disappearing, for many years, and the terrific violence of the 
inundations which are now laying it waste is ascribed, by the ablest inves¬ 
tigators, to that cause. In an article inserted in the Annales Forestieres 
for 1843, quoted by Ilohenstein, Der Wald , p. 177, it is said that about one 
third of the area of the department had already become absolutely barren, 
in consequence of clearing, and that the destruction of the woods was still 
going on with great rapidity, blew torrents were constantly forming, and 
they were estimated to have covered more than 70,000 acres of good land, 
or one sixth of the surface of the department, with sand and gravel. 


390 


DAMAGE DONE BY FLOODS. 


which lies transversely or obliquely to that of the Ardeche, is 
not at all affected.* 

It is easy to see that the damage occasioned by such floods 
as I have described must be almost incalculable, and it is by 
no means confined to the effects produced by overflow and the 
mechanical force of the superficial currents. In treating of 
the devastations of torrents in a former chapter, I confined 
myself principally to the erosion of surface and the transporta¬ 
tion of mineral matter to lower grounds by them. The gen¬ 
eral action of torrents, as there shown, tends to the ultimate 
elevation of their beds by the deposit of the earth, gravel, and 
stone conveyed by them; but until they have thus raised their 
outlets so as sensibly to diminish the inclination of their chan¬ 
nels—and sometimes when extraordinary floods give the tor¬ 
rents momentum enough to sweep away the accumulations 
which they have themselves heaped up—the swift flow of their 
currents, aided by the abrasion of the rolling rocks and gravel, 
scoops their beds constantly deeper, and they consequently not 
only undermine their banks, but frequently sap the most solid 
foundations which the art of man can build for the support of 
bridges and hydraulic structures.f 

* “ There is no example of a coincidence between great floods of the 
Ard&che and of the Rhone, all the known inundations of the former hav¬ 
ing taken place when the latter was very low.” —Haedignt, Memoire sur 
les Inondations des Rivieres de VArdeche, p. 26. 

I take this occasion to acknowledge myself indebted to the interesting 
memoir just quoted for all the statements I make respecting the floods of 
the Ard&che, except the comparison of the volume of its waters with that 
of the Nile, and the computation with respect to the capacity required for 
reservoirs to be constructed in its basin. 

t In some cases where the bed of rapid Alpine streams is composed of 
very hard rock—as is the case in many of the valleys once filled by ancient 
glaciers—and especially where they are fed by glaciers not overhung by 
crumbling cliffs, the channel may remain almost unchanged for centuries. 
This is observable in many of the tributaries of the Dora Baltea, which 
drains the valley of the Aosta. Several of these small rivers are spanned 
by more or less perfect Roman bridges—one of which, that over the Lys at 
Pont St. Martin, is still in good repair and in constant use, An examination 


SCOOPING OUT AND FILLING UP OF EIVER BEDS. 391 

In the inundation of 1857, the Ardeche destroyed a stone 
bridge near La Beaume, which had been built about eighty 
years before. The resistance of the piers, which were erected 
on piles, the channel at that point being of gravel, produced 
an eddying current that washed away the bed of the river 
above them, and the foundation, thus deprived of lateral sup- 
port, yielded to the weight of the bridge, and the piles and 
piers fell up stream. 

By a curious law of compensation, the stream which, at 
flood, scoops out cavities in its bed, often fills them up again 
as soon as the diminished velocity of the current allows it to 
let fall the sand and gravel with which it is charged, so that 
when the waters return to their usual channel, the bottom 
shows no sign of having been disturbed. In a flood of the 
Escontay, a tributary of the Rhone, in 1846, piles driven six¬ 
teen feet into its gravelly bed for the foundation of a pier were 
torn up and carried off, and yet, when the river had fallen to 
low-water mark, the bottom at that point appeared to have 
been raised higher than it was before the flood, by new de¬ 
posits of sand and gravel, while the cut stones of the half-built 
pier were found buried to a great depth in the excavation 
wdiich the water had first washed out. The gravel with which 
rivers thus restore the level of their beds is principally derived 
from the crushing of the rocks brought down by the mountain 
torrents, and the destructive effects of inundations are im¬ 
mensely diminished by this reduction of large stones to minute 
fragments. If the blocks hurled down from the cliffs were 
transported unbroken to the channels of large rivers, the me¬ 
chanical force of their movement would be irresistible. They 
would overthrow the strongest barriers, spread themselves 

of the rocks on which the abutments of this and some other similar struc¬ 
tures are founded, and of the channels of the rivers they cross, shows that 
the beds of the streams cannot have been much elevated or depressed since 
the bridges were built. In other cases, as at the outlet of the Val Tour- 
nanclie at Chatillon, where a single rib of a Roman bridge still remains, 
there is nothing to forbid the supposition that the deep excavation of the 
channel may have been partly effected at a much later period. 


392 


CRUSHING FORCE OF TORRENTS. 


over a surface as wide as the flow of the waters, and convert 
the most smiling valleys into scenes of the wildest desolation. 


c. Crushing Force of Torrents. 

There are few operations of nature where the effect seems 
more disproportioned to the cause than in the comminution of 
rock in the channel of swift waters. Igneous rocks are gen¬ 
erally so hard as to he wrought with great difficulty, and they 
hear the weight of enormous superstructures without yielding 
to the pressure; but to the torrent they are as wheat to the mill¬ 
stone. The streams which pour down the southern scarp of the 
Mediterranean Alps along the Riviera di Ponente, near Genoa, 
have short courses, and a brisk walk of a couple of hours or 
even less takes you from the sea beach to the headspring of 
many of them. In their heaviest floods, they bring rounded 
masses of serpentine quite down to the sea, but at ordinary 
high water their lower course is charged only with finely 
divided particles of that rock. Hence, while, near their 
sources, their channels are filled with pebbles and angular 
fragments, intermixed with a little gravel, the proportions are 
reversed near their mouths, and, just above the points where 
their outlets are partially choked by the rolling shingle of the 
beech, their beds are composed of sand and gravel to the 
almost total exclusion of pebbles. The greatest depth of the 
basin of the Ardeche is seventy-five miles, but most of its trib¬ 
utaries have a much shorter course. “ These affluents,” says 
Mardigny, “ hurl into the bed of the Ardeche enormous blocks 
of rock, which this river, in its turn, bears onward, and grinds 
down, at high water, so that its current rolls only gravel at its 
confluence with the Rhone.” * 


* Memoire sur les Inondations des Rivieres de VArdeche, p. 16. “ The 

terrific roar, the thunder of the raging torrents proceeds principally from 
the stones which are rolled along in the bed of the stream. This move¬ 
ment is attended with such powerful attrition that, in the Southern Alps, 
the atmosphere of valleys where the limestone contains bitumen, has, at 
the time of floods, the marked bituminous smell produced by rubbing 


INUNDATIONS OF 1856 . 


393 


Guglielmini argued that the gravel and sand of the beds 
of running streams were derived from the trituration of rocks 
by the action of the currents, and inferred that this action was 
generally sufficient to reduce hard rock to sand in its passage 
from the source to the outlet of rivers. Frisi controverted this 
opinion, and maintained that river sand was of more ancient 
origin, and he inferred from experiments in artificially grinding 
stones that the concussion, friction, and attrition of rock in the 
channel of running waters were inadequate to its comminution, 
though he admitted that these same causes might reduce sili- 
cious sand to a fine powder capable of transportation to the 
sea by the currents.* Frisks experiments were tried upon 
rounded and polished river pebbles, and prove nothing with 
regard to the action of torrents upon the irregular, more or 
less weathered, and often cracked and shattered rocks which 
lie loose in the ground at the head of mountain valleys. The 
fury of the waters and of the wind which accompanies them 
in the floods of the French Alpine torrents is such, that large 
blocks of stone are hurled out of the bed of the stream to 
the height of twelve or thirteen feet. The impulse of masses 
driven with such force overthrows the most solid masonry, 
and their concussion cannot fail to be attended with the crush¬ 
ing of the rocks themselves.f 

d. Inundations of 1856 in France. 

The month of May, 1856, was remarkable for violent and 
almost uninterrupted rains, and most of the river basins of 
France were inundated to an extraordinary height. In the 
valleys of the Loire and its affluents, about a million of acres, 
including many towns and villages, were laid under water, 
and the amount of pecuniary damage was almost incal¬ 
culable.^: The flood was not less destructive in the valley of 

pieces of such limestone together.” — Wessely, Die 0esterreicMschen Alpen- 
lander , i, p. 113. 

* Frisi, Del modo di regolare i Fiumi e i Torrenti , pp. 4-19. 
f Surell, Itude sur lee Torrents , pp. 31-36. 
t Champion, Les Inondations en France , iii, p. 156, note. 


394 


INUNDATIONS OF 1856 . 


tlie Rlione, and in fact an invasion by a hostile army could 
hardly have been more disastrous to the inhabitants of the 
plains than was this terrible deluge. There had been a flood 
of this latter river in the year 1840, which, for height and 
quantity of water, was almost as remarkable as that of 1856, 
but it took place in the month of November, when the crops 
had all been harvested, and the injury inflicted by it upon 
agriculturists was, therefore, of a character to be less severely 
and less immediately felt than the consequences of the inunda¬ 
tion of 1856.* 

In the fifteen years between these two great floods, the 
population and the rural improvements of the river valleys 
had much increased, common roads, bridges, and railways had 
been multiplied and extended, telegraph lines had been con¬ 
structed, all of which shared in the general ruin, and hence 
greater and more diversified interests were affected by the 
catastrophe of 1856 than by any former like calamity. The 
great flood of 1840 had excited the attention and roused the 
sympathies of the French people, and the subject was invested 
with new interest by the still more formidable character of the 
inundations of 1856. It was felt that these scourges had ceased 
to be a matter of merely local concern, for, although they bore 
most heavily on those whose homes and fields were situated 
within the immediate reach of the swelling waters, yet they 
frequently destroyed harvests valuable enough to be a matter 
of national interest, endangered the personal security of the 
population of important political centres, interrupted com¬ 
munication for days and even weeks together on great lines of 

* Notwithstanding this favorable circumstance, the damage done by 
the inundation of 1840 in the valley of the Rhone was estimated at seventy- 
two millions of francs. —Champion, Les Inondations en France , iv, p. 124. 

Several smaller floods of the Rhone, experienced at a somewhat earlier 
season of the year in 1846, occasioned a loss of forty-five millions of francs. 
“What if,” says Dumont, “instead of happening in October, that is be¬ 
tween harvest and seedtime, they had occurred before the crops were se¬ 
cured ? The damage would have been counted by hundreds of millions.” 
—Fes Travaux Publics , p. 99, note. 


THE FOREST AS A PROTECTION AGAINST INUNDATIONS. 395 

traffic and travel—thus severing as it were all Southwestern 
France from the rest of the empire—and finally threatened to 
produce great and permanent geographical changes. The 
well-being of the whole commonwealth was seen to he in¬ 
volved in preventing the recurrence, and in limiting the range 
of such devastations. The Government encouraged scientific 
investigation of the phenomena and their laws. Their causes, 
their history, their immediate and remote consequences, and 
the possible safeguards to be employed against them, have 
been carefully studied by the most eminent physicists, as well 
as by the ablest theoretical and practical engineers of France. 
Many hitherto unobserved facts have been collected, many 
new hypotheses suggested, and many plans, more or less origi¬ 
nal in character, have been devised for combating the evil; 
but thus far, the most competent judges are not well agreed as 
to the mode, or even the possibility, of applying a remedy. 


e. Remedies against Inundations. 

Perhaps no one point has been more prominent in the dis¬ 
cussions than the influence of the forest in equalizing and 
regulating the flow of the water of precipitation. As we have 
already seen, opinion is still somewhat divided on this subject, 
but the conservative action of the woods in this respect has 
been generally recognized by the public of France, and the 
Government of the empire has made this principle the basis of 
important legislation for the protection of existing forests, and 
for the formation of new. The clearing of woodland, and the 
organization and functions of a police for its protection, are 
regulated by a law bearing date June 18th, 1859, and pro¬ 
vision was made for promoting the restoration of private 
woods by a statute adopted on the 28th of July, 1860. The 
former of these laws passed the legislative body by a vote of 
246 against 4, the latter with but a single negative voice. 
The influence of the government, in a country where the throne 
is so potent as in France, would account for a large majority, 
but when it is considered that both laws, the former especially, 


396 CHARACTER AND EFFECT OF THE NEW MEASURES. 

interfere very materially with the rights of private domain, 
the almost entire unanimity with which they were adopted is 
proof of a very general popular conviction, that the protection 
and extension of the forests is a measure more likely than any 
other to check the violence, if not to prevent the recurrence, of 
destructive inundations. The law of July 28th, 1860, appropri¬ 
ated 10,000,000 francs, to be expended, at the rate of 1,000,000 
francs per year, in executing or aiding the replanting of woods. 
It is computed that this appropriation will secure the creation 
of new forest to the extent of about 250,000 acres, or one elev¬ 
enth part of the soil where the restoration of the forest is 
thought feasible and, at the same time, specially important as 
a security against the evils ascribed in a great measure to its 
destruction. 

The provisions of the laws in question are preventive rather 
than remedial; but some immediate effect may he expected to 
result from them, particularly if they are accompanied with 
certain other measures, the suggestion of which has been 
favorably received. The strong repugnance of the moun¬ 
taineers to the application of a system which deprives them 
of a part of their pasturage—for the absolute exclusion of 
domestic animals is indispensable to the maintenance of an 
existing forest and to the formation of a new—is the most 
formidable obstacle to the execution of the laws of 1859-’60. 
Jt is proposed to compensate this loss by a cheap system of 
irrigation of lower pasture grounds, consisting in little more 
than in running horizontal furrows along the hillsides, thus 
converting the scarp of the hills into a succession of small ter¬ 
races which, when once turfed over, are very permanent. 
Experience is said to have demonstrated that this simple pro¬ 
cess suffices to retain the water of rains, of snows, and of small 
springs and rivulets, long enough for the irrigation of the soil, 
thus increasing its product of herbage in a fivefold proportion, 
and that it partially checks the too rapid flow of surface water 
into the valleys, and, consequently, in some measure obviates 
one of the most prominent causes of inundations.* It is evi- 

* Troy, Etude sur le Reboisement des Montagues , §§ 6, 7 , 21. 


CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF INUNDATIONS. 39T 

dent that if such results are produced by this method, its intro¬ 
duction upon an extensive scale must also have the same 
climatic effects as other systems of irrigation. 

Whatever may he the ultimate advantages of reclothing a 
large extent of the territory of France with wood, or of so 
shaping its surface as to prevent the too rapid flow of water 
over it, the results to he obtained by such processes can he 
realized in an adequate measure only after a long succession 
of years. Other steps must he taken, both for the immediate 
security of the lives and property of the present generation, 
and for the prevention of yet greater and remoter evils which 

are inevitable unless means to obviate them are found before 

€ 

it is forever too late. The frequent recurrence of inundations 
like those of 1856, for a single score of years, in the basins of 
the Rhone and the Loire, with only the present securities 
against them, would almost depopulate the valleys of those 
rivers, and produce physical revolutions in them, which, like 
revolutions in the political world, could never he made to “ go 
backward.” 

Destructive inundations are seldom, if ever, produced by 
precipitation within the limits of the principal valley, hut 
almost uniformly by sudden thaws or excessive rains on the 
mountain ranges where the tributaries take their rise. It is 
therefore plain that any measures which shall check the flow 
of surface waters into the channels of the affluents, or which 
shall retard the delivery of such waters into the principal 
stream by its tributaries, will diminish in the same proportion 
the dangers and the evils of inundation by great rivers. The 
retention of the surface waters upon or in the soil can hardly 
be accomplished except by the methods already mentioned, 
replanting of forests, and furrowing or terracing. The current 
af mountain streams can be checked by various methods, 
among which the most familiar and obvious is the erection of 
barriers or dams across their channels, at points convenient for 
forming reservoirs large enough to retain the superfluous 
waters of great rains and thaws. Besides the utility of such 
basins in preventing floods, the construction of them is recom- 


398 


BASINS OF RECEPTION. 


mended by very strong considerations, such as tbe meteoro¬ 
logical effects of increased evaporable surface, tbe furnishing 
of a constant supply of water for agricultural and mechanical 
purposes, and, finally, their value as ponds for breeding and 
rearing fish, and, perhaps, for cultivating aquatic vegetables. 

The objections to the general adoption of the system of 
reservoirs are these: the expense of their construction and 
maintenance; the reduction of cultivable area by the amount 
of surface they must cover ; the interruption they would occa¬ 
sion to free communication; the probability that they would 
soon be filled up with sediment, and the obvious fact that 
when full of earth or even water, they would no longer serve 
their principal purpose; the great danger to which they would 
expose the country below them in case of the bursting of their 
barriers ; * the evil consequences they would occasion by pro¬ 
longing the flow of inundations in proportion as they dimin¬ 
ished their height; the injurious effects it is supposed they 
would produce upon the salubrity of the neighboring districts ; 
and, lastly, the alleged impossibility of constructing artificial 
basins sufficient in capacity to prevent, or in any considerable 
measure to mitigate, the evils they are intended to guard 
against. 

The last argument is more easily reduced to a numerical 
question than the others. The mean and extreme annual pre¬ 
cipitation of all the basins where the construction of such 
works would be seriously proposed is already approximately 
known by meteorological tables, and the quantity of water, 
delivered by the greatest floods which have occurred within 
the memory of man, may be roughly estimated from their 
visible traces. From these elements, or from recorded ob¬ 
servations, the capacity of the necessary reservoirs can be cal¬ 
culated. Let us take the case of the Ard&che. In the inun¬ 
dation of 1857, that river poured into the Rhone 1,305,000,000 
cubic yards of water in three days. If we suppose that half 

* For accounts of damage from the bursting of reservoirs, see Vallee, 
Memoire sur les Reservoirs <PAlimentation des Canaux , Annalcs dcs Fonts et 
Chaussees , 1833, ler s£mestre, p. 261. 


BASINS OF RECEPTION. 


399 


this quantity might have been suffered to flow down its chan¬ 
nel without inconvenience, w^e shall have about 650,000,000 
cubic yards to provide for by reservoirs. The Ardeche and 
its principal affluent, the Chassezac, have, together, about 
twelve considerable tributaries rising near the crest of the 
mountains which bound the basin. If reservoirs of equal 
capacity were constructed upon all of them, each reservoir 
must be able to contain 54,000,000 cubic yards, or, in other 
words, must be equal to a lake 3,000 yards long, 1,000 yards 
wide, and 18 yards deep, and besides, in order to render any 
effectual service, the reservoirs must all have been empty at 
the commencement of the rains which produced the inun¬ 
dation. 

Thus far, I have supposed the swelling of the waters to be 
uniform throughout the whole basin; but such was by no 
means the fact in the inundation of 1857, for the rise of the 
Chassezac, which is as large as the Ardeche proper, did not 
exceed the limits of ordinary floods, and the dangerous excess 
came solely from the headwaters of the latter stream. Hence 
reservoirs of double the capacity I have supposed would have 
been necessary upon the tributaries of that river, to prevent 
the injurious effects of the inundation. It is evident that the 
construction of reservoirs of such magnitude for such a purpose 
is financially, if not physically, impracticable, and when we 
take into account a point I have just suggested, namely, that 
the reservoirs must be empty at all times of apprehended flood, 
and, of course, their utility limited almost solely to the single 
object of preventing inundations, the total inapplicability of 
such a measure in this particular case becomes still more glar¬ 
ingly manifest. 

Another not less conclusive fact is that the valleys of all 
the upland tributaries of the Ardeche descend so rapidly, and 
have so little lateral expansion, as to render the construction 
of capacious reservoirs in them quite impracticable. Indeed, 
engineers have found but two points in the whole basin suit¬ 
able for that purpose, and the reservoirs admissible at these 
would have only a joint capacity of about 70,000,000 cubic 


400 


BASINS IN PERU AND SPAIN. 


yards, or less than one ninth part of what I suppose to be 
required. The case of the Ardeche is no doubt an extreme 
one, both in the topographical character of its basin and in its 
exposure to excessive rains; but all destructive inundations 
are, in a certain sense, extreme cases also, and this of the 
Ardeche serves to show that the construction of reservoirs is 
not by any means to be regarded as a universal panacea 
against floods. 

Nor, on the other hand, is this measure to be summarily 
rejected. Nature has adopted it on a great scale, on both 
flanks of the Alps, and on a smaller, on those of the Adiron- 
dacks and lower chains, and in this as in many other instances, 
her processes may often be imitated with advantage. The 
validity of the remaining objections to the system under dis¬ 
cussion depends on the topography, geology, and special cli¬ 
mate of the regions where it is proposed to establish such 
reservoirs. Many upland streams present numerous points 
where none of these objections, except those of expense and of 
danger from the breaking of dams, could have any application. 
Reservoirs may be so constructed as to retain the entire pre¬ 
cipitation of the heaviest thaws and rains, leaving only the 
ordinary quantity to flow along the channel; they may be 
raised to such a height as only partially to obstruct the surface 
drainage; or they may be provided with sluices by means of 
which their whole contents can be discharged in the dry sea¬ 
son and a summer crop be grown upon the ground they cover 
at high water. The expediency of employing them and the 
mode of construction depend on local conditions, and no rules 
of universal applicability can be laid down on the subject. 

It is remarkable that nations which we, in the false pride 
of our modern civilization, so generally regard as little less 
than barbarian, should have long preceded Christian Europe in 
the systematic employment of great artificial basins for the 
various purposes they are calculated to subserve. The ancient 
Peruvians built strong walls, of excellent workmanship, across 
the channels of the mountain sources of important streams, 
and the Arabs executed immense works of similar description, 


CHANGE OF RIVER BED. 


401 


both in the great Arabian peninsula and in all the provinces 
of Spain which had the good fortune to fall under their sway. 
The Spaniards of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who, in 
many points of true civilization and culture, were far inferior 
to the races they subdued, wantonly destroyed these noble 
monuments of social and political wisdom, or suffered them to 
perish, because they were too ignorant to appreciate their 
value, or too unskilful as practical engineers to be able to 
maintain them, and some of their most important territories 
were soon reduced to sterility and poverty in consequence. 

Another method of preventing or diminishing the evils of 
inundation by torrents and mountain rivers, analogous to that 
employed for the drainage of lakes, consists in the permanent 
or occasional diversion of their surplus waters, or of their entire 
currents, from their natural courses, by tunnels or open chan¬ 
nels cut through their banks. Nature, in many cases, resorts 
to a similar process. Most great rivers divide themselves into 
several arms in their lower course, and enter the sea by dif¬ 
ferent mouths. There are also cases where rivers send off lat¬ 
eral branches to convey a part of their waters into the channel 
of other streams.' 55 ' The most remarkable of these is the junc¬ 
tion between the Amazon and the Orinoco by the natural 
canal of the Cassiquiare and the Rio Negro. In India, the 
Cambodja and the Menam are connected by the Anam ; the 
Saluen and the Irawaddi by the Panlaun. There are similar 
examples, though on a much smaller scale, in Europe. The 
Tornea and the Calix rivers in Lapland communicate by the 
Tarando, and in Westphalia, the Else, an arm of the Haase, 
falls into the Weser. 

The change of bed in rivers by gradual erosion of their 
banks is familiar to all, but instances of the sudden abandon¬ 
ment of a primitive channel are by no means wanting. At a 

* Some geographical writers apply the term bifurcation exclusively to 
this intercommunication of rivers; others, with more etymological pro¬ 
priety, use it to express the division of great rivers into branches at the 
head of their deltas. A technical term is wanting to designate the phe¬ 
nomenon mentioned in the text. 

26 


402 


NILE CANALS—DIVERSION OF RIVERS. 


period of unknown antiquity, the Ard^che pierced a tunnel 
200 feet wide and 100 high, through a rock, and sent its whole 
current through it, deserting its former bed, which gradually 
filled up, though its course remained traceable. In the great 
inundation of 1827, the tunnel proved insufficient for the dis¬ 
charge of the water, and the river burst through the obstruc¬ 
tions which had now choked up its ancient channel, and re¬ 
sumed its original course.* 

It was probably such facts as these that suggested to 
ancient engineers the possibility of like artificial operations, 
and there are numerous instances of the execution of works for 
this purpose in very remote ages. The Bahr Jusef, the great 
stream which supplies the Fayoum with water from the Nile, 
has been supposed, by some writers, to be a natural channel; 
but both it and the Bahr el Wady are almost certainly arti¬ 
ficial canals constructed to water that basin, to regulate the 
level of Lake Moeris, and possibly, also, to diminish the dan¬ 
gers resulting from excessive inundations of the Nile, by serv¬ 
ing as waste-weirs to discharge a part of its surplus waters. 
Several of the seven ancient mouths of the Nile are believed 
to be artificial channels, and Herodotus even asserts that King 
Menes diverted the entire course of that river from the Libyan 
to the Arabian side of the valley. There are traces of an 
ancient river bed along the western mountains, which give 
some countenance to this statement. But it is much more 
probable that the works of Menes were designed rather to 
prevent a natural, than to produce an artificial, change in the 
channel of the river. 

Two of the most celebrated cascades in Europe, those of 
the Teverone at Tivoli and of the Yelino at Terni, owe, if not 
their existence, at least their position and character, to the 
diversion of their waters from their natural beds into new 
channels, in order to obviate the evils produced by their fre¬ 
quent floods. Remarkable works of the same sort have been 
executed in Switzerland, in very recent times. Until the year 


* Mabdigny, Memoire sur lea Inondations de VArdeche, p. 13 . 


GLACIER LAKES. 


403 


1714, the Kander, which drains several large Alpine valleys, 
ran, for a considerable distance, parallel with the Lake of 
Thun, and a few miles below the city of that name emptied 
into the river Aar. It frequently flooded the flats along the 
lower part of its course, and it was determined to divert it into 
the Lake of Thun. For this purpose, two parallel tunnels 
were cut through the intervening rock, and the river turned 
into them. The violence of the current burst up the roof of 
the tunnels, and, in a very short time, wore the new channel 
down not less than one hundred feet, and even deepened the 
former bed at least fifty feet, for a distance of two or three 
miles above the tunnel. The lake was two hundred feet deep 
at the point where the river was conducted into it, hut the 
gravel and sand carried down by the Kander has formed at its 
mouth a delta containing more than a hundred acres, which is 
still advancing at the rate of several yards a year. The Linth, 
which formerly sent its waters directly to the Lake of Zurich, 
and often produced very destructive inundations, was turned 
into the Wallensee about forty years ago, and in both these 
cases a great quantity of valuable land was rescued both from 
flood and from insalubrity. 

In Switzerland, the most terrible inundations often result 
from the damming up of deep valleys by ice slips or by the 
gradual advance of glaciers, and the accumulation of great 
masses of water above the obstructions. The ice is finally dis¬ 
solved by the heat of summer or the flow of warm waters, and 
when it bursts, the lake formed above is discharged almost in 
an instant, and all below is swept down to certain destruction. 
In 1595, about a hundred and fifty lives and a great amount 
of property were lost by the eruption of a lake formed by the 
descent of a glacier into the valley of the France, and a sim¬ 
ilar calamity laid waste a considerable extent of soil in the 
year 1818. On this latter occasion, the barrier of ice and 
snow was 3,000 feet long, 600 thick, and 400 high, and the 
lake which had formed above it contained not less than 
800,000,000 cubic feet. A tunnel was driven through the ice, 
and about 300,000,000 cubic feet of water safely drawn off by 


404 


KIVER EMBANKMENTS. 


it, but the thawing of the walls of the tunnel rapidly enlarged 
it, and before the lake was half drained, the barrier gave way 
and the remaining 500,000,000 cubic feet of water were dis¬ 
charged in half an hour. The recurrence of these floods has 
since been prevented by directing streams of water, w T armed 
by the sun, upon the ice in the bed of the valley, and thus 
thawing it before it accumulates in sufficient mass to threaten 
serious danger. 

In the cases of diversion of streams above mentioned, im¬ 
portant geographical changes have been directly produced by 
those operations. By the rarer process of draining glacier 
lakes, natural eruptions of water, which would have occasioned 
not less important changes in the face of the earth, have been 
prevented by human agency. 

The principal means hitherto relied upon for defence 
against river inundations has been the construction of dikes 
along the banks of the streams, parallel to the channel and 
generally separated from each other by a distance not much 
greater than the natural width of the bed.* If such walls are 
high enough to confine the water and strong enough to resist 
its pressure, they secure the lands behind them from all the 
evils of inundation except those resulting from infiltration; 
but such ramparts are enormously costly in original construc¬ 
tion and maintenance, and, as we have already seen, the filling 
up of the bed of the river in its lower course, by sand and 
gravel, involves the necessity of occasionally incurring new 
expenditures in increasing the height of the banks, f They 

* In the case of rivers flowing through wide alluvial plains and much 
inclined to shift their beds, like the Po, the embankments often leave a 
very wide space between them. The dikes of the Po are sometimes three 
or four miles apart.— Baumgakten, after Lombardini, Annales des Ponts et 
Ohaussees , 1847, ler s<§mestre, p. 149. 

t It appears from the investigations of Lombardini that the rate of ele¬ 
vation of the bed of the Po has been much exaggerated by earlier writers, 
and in some parts of its course the change is so slow that its level may be 
regarded as nearly constant.— Batjmgarten, volume before cited, pp. 175, 
et seqq. 

If the western coast of the Adriatic is undergoing a secular depression, 


RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 


405 


are attended, too, with some collateral disadvantages. They 
deprive the earth of the fertilizing deposits of the waters, 
which are powerful natural restoratives of soils exhausted by 
cultivation; they accelerate the rapidity and transporting 
power of the current at high water by confining it to a nar¬ 
rower channel, and it consequently conveys to the sea the 
earthy matter it holds in suspension, and chokes up harbors 
with a deposit which it would otherwise have spread over a 
wide surface; they interfere with roads and the convenience 
of river navigation, and no amount of cost or care can secure 
them from occasional rupture, in case of which the rush of the 
waters through the breach is more destructive than the natural 
flow of the highest inundation.* 

as many circumstances concur to prove, the sinking of the plain near the 
coast may both tend to prevent the deposit of sediment in the river bed by 
increasing the velocity of its current, and compensate the elevation really 
produced by deposits, so that no sensible elevation would result, though 
much gravel and slime might be let fall. 

* To secure the city of Sacramento in California from the inundations 
to which it is subject, a dike or levee was built upon the bank of the river 
and raised to an elevation above that of the highest known floods, and it 
was connected, below the town, with grounds lying considerably above the 
river. On one occasion a breach in the dike occurred above the town at 
a very high stage of the flood. The water poured in behind it, and over¬ 
flowed the lower part of the city, which remained submerged for some 
time after the river had retired to it3 ordinary level, because the dike, 
which had been built to keep the water out, now kept it in. 

According to Arthur Young, on the lower Po, where the current of the 
river has been elevated much above the level of the adjacent fields by 
diking, the peasants in his time frequently endeavored to secure their 
grounds against threatened devastation through the bursting of the dikes, 
by crossing the river when the danger became imminent, and opening a 
cut in the opposite bank, thus saving their own property by flooding their 
neighbors’. He adds, that at high water the navigation of the river was 
absolutely interdicted, except to mail and passenger boats, and that the 
guards fired upon all others; the object of the prohibition being to prevent 
the peasants from resorting to this measure of self-defence .—Travels in 
Italy and Spain , Nov. 7, 1789. 

In a flood of the Po in 1839, a breach of the embankment took place at 
Bonizzo. The water poured through and inundated 116,000 acres, or 181 


406 


TRANSVERSE EMBANKMENTS. 


For these reasons, many experienced engineers are of 
opinion that the system of longitudinal dikes ought to he 
abandoned, or, where that cannot be done without involving 
too great a sacrifice of existing constructions, their elevation 
should be much reduced, so as to present no obstruction to the 
lateral spread of extraordinary floods, and they should be pro¬ 
vided with sluices to admit the water without violence when¬ 
ever they are likely to be overflowed. Where dikes have not 
been erected, and where they have been reduced in height, it 
is proposed to construct, at convenient intervals, transverse 
embankments of moderate height running from the banks of 
the river across the plains to the hills which bound them. 
These measures, it is argued, will diminish the violence of 
inundations by permitting the waters to extend themselves 
over a greater surface, and thus retarding the flow of the river 
currents, and will, at the same time, secure the deposit of fer¬ 
tilizing slime upon all the soil covered by the flood. 

Rozet, an eminent French engineer, has proposed a method 
of diminishing the ravages of inundations, which aims to com¬ 
bine the advantages of all other systems, and at the same time 
to obviate the objections to which they are all more or less 
liable.* The plan of Rozet is recommended by its simplicity 
and cheapness as well as its facility and rapidity of execution, 
and is looked upon with favor by many persons very compe¬ 
tent to judge in such matters. He proposes to commence wfith 
the amphitheatres in which mountain torrents so often rise, by 
covering their slopes and filling their beds with loose blocks 
of rock, and by constructing at their outlets, and at other nar¬ 
row points in the channels of the torrents, permeable barriers 
of the same material promiscuously heaped up, much accord¬ 
ing to the method employed by the ancient Romans in their 
northern provinces for a similar purpose. By this means, he 

square miles, of the plain, to the depth of from twenty to twenty-three feet 
in its lower parts.—B aumgakten, after Lombakdini, volume before cited, 
p. 152. 

* Moyens de forcer les Torrents de rendre une partie du sol quHls rasa- 
gent, et d'empecher les grander Inondations. 


rozet’s plan. 


407 


supposes, the rapidity of the current would be checked, and the 
quantity of transported pebbles and gravel much diminished. 

When the stream has reached that part of its course where 
it is bordered by soil capable of cultivation, and worth the 
expense of protection, he proposes to place along one or both 
sides of the stream, according to circumstances, a line of cubical 
blocks of stone or pillars of masonry three or four feet high 
and wide, and at the distance of about eleven yards from each 
other. The space between the two lines, or between a line and 
the opposite high bank, would, of course, be determined by 
observation of the width of the swift-water current at high 
floods. As an auxiliary measure, small ditches and banks, or 
low walls of pebbles, should be constructed from the line of 
blocks across the grounds to be protected, nearly at right 
angles to the current, but slightly inclining downward, and at 
convenient distances from each other. Hozet thinks the proper 
interval would be 300 yards, and it is evident that, if he is 
right in his main principle, hedges, rows of trees, or even 
common fences, would in many cases answer as good a pur¬ 
pose as banks and trenches or low walls. The blocks or pillars 
of stone would, he contends, check the lateral currents so as to 
compel them to let fall all their pebbles and gravel in the main 
channel—where they would be rolled along until ground down 
to sand or silt—and the transverse obstructions would detain 
the water upon the soil long enough to secure the deposit of 
its fertilizing slime. Numerous facts are cited in support of 
the author’s views, and I imagine there are few residents of 
rural districts whose own observation will not furnish testi¬ 
mony confirmatory of their soundness.* 

* The effect of trees and other detached obstructions in checking the 
flow of water is particularly noticed by Pa-lissy in his essay on Waters and 
Fountains , p. 173, edition of 1844. “ There be,” says he, “in divers parts 

of France, and specially at Nantes, wooden bridges, where, to break the 
force of the waters and of the floating ice, which might endamage the piers 
of the said bridges, they have driven upright timbers into the bed of the 
rivers above the said piers, without the which they should abide biu little. 
And in like wise, the trees which be planted along the mountains do much 
deaden the violence of the waters that flow from them. 


408 


RIVER DEPOSITS. 


The deposit of slime by rivers upon the flats along their 
banks not only contributes greatly to the fertility of the soil 
thus flowed, but it subserves a still more important purpose in 
the general economy of nature. All running streams begin 
with excavating channels for themselves, or deepening the 
natural depressions in which they flow ; * but in proportion as 
their outlets are raised by the solid material transported by 
their currents, their velocity is diminished, they deposit gravel 
and sand at constantly higher and higher points, and so at last 
elevate, in the middle and lower part of their course, the beds 
they had previously scooped out.f The raising of the chan- 

* I do not mean to say that all rivers excavate their own valleys, for I 
have no doubt that in the majority of cases such depressions of the surface 
originate in higher geological causes, and hence the valley makes the river, 
not the river the valley. But even if we suppose a basin of the hardest rock 
to be elevated at once, completely formed, from the submarine abyss where 
it was fashioned, the first shower of rain that falls upon it after it rises to 
the air, though its waters will follow the lowest lines of the surface, will 
cut those lines deeper, and so on with every successive rain. The disin¬ 
tegrated rock from the upper part of the basin forms the lower by alluvial 
deposit, which is constantly transported farther and farther until the re¬ 
sistance of gravitation and cohesion balances the mechanical force of the 
running water. Thus plains, more or less steeply inclined, are formed, in 
which the river is constantly changing its bed, according to the perpetually 
varying force and direction of its currents, modified as they are by ever- 
fluctuating conditions. Thus the Po is said to have long inclined to move 
its channel southward in consequence of the superior mechanical force of 
its northern affluents. A diversion of these tributaries from their present 
beds, so that they should enter the main stream at other points and in dif¬ 
ferent directions, might modify the whole course of that great river. But 
the mechanical force of the tributary is not the only element of its influ¬ 
ence on the course of the principal stream. The deposits it lodges in the 
bed of the latter, acting as simple obstructions or causes of diversion, are 
not less important agents of change. 

t The distance to which a new obstruction to the flow of a river, 
whether by a dam or by a deposit in its channel, will retard its current, 
or, in popular phrase, “ set back the water,” is a problem of more diffi¬ 
cult practical solution than almost any other in hydraulics. The elements 
—such as straightness or crookedness of channel, character of bottom and 
hanks, volume and previous velocity of current, mass of water far above 
the obstruction, extraordinary drought or humidity of seasons, relative 


EFFECTS OF EMBANKMENTS, 


409 


nels is compensated in part by tbe simultaneous elevation of 
tlieir banks and tbe flats adjoining them, from the deposit of 
the finer particles of earth and vegetable mould brought down 
from the mountains, without which elevation the low grounds 
bordering all rivers would be, as in many cases they in fact 
are, mere morasses. 

All arrangements which tend to obstruct this process of 
raising the flats adjacent to the channel, whether consisting in 
dikes which confine the waters, and, at the same time, aug¬ 
ment the velocity of the current, or in other means of pro¬ 
ducing the last-mentioned effect, interfere with the restorative 
economy of nature, and at last occasion the formation of 
marshes where, if left to herself, she would have accumulated 

extent to which the river may be affected by the precipitation in its own 
basin, and by supplies received through subterranean channels from sources 
so distant as to be exposed to very different meteorological influences, effects 
of clearing and other improvements always going on in new countries—are 
all extremely difficult, and some of them impossible, to he known and 
measured. In the American States, very numerous watermills have been 
erected within a few years, and there is scarcely a stream in the settled 
portion of the country which has not several milldams upon it. When a 
dam is raised—a process which the gradual diminution of the summer cur¬ 
rents renders frequently necessary—or when a new dam is built, it often 
happens that the meadows above are flowed, or that the retardation of the 
stream extends back to the dam next above. This leads to frequent law¬ 
suits. From the great uncertainty of the facts, the testimony is more con¬ 
flicting in these than in any other class of cases, and the obstinacy with 
which “ water causes ” are disputed has become proverbial. 

The subterranean courses of the waters form a subject very difficult of 
investigation, and it is only recently that its vast importance has been 
recognized. The interesting observations of Schmidt on the caves of the 
Karst and their rivers throw much light on the underground hydrography 
of limestone districts, and serve to explain how, in the low peninsula of 
Florida, rivers, which must have their sources in mountains a hundred or 
more miles distant, can pour out of the earth in currents large enough to 
admit of steamboat navigation to their very basins of eruption. Artesian 
wells are revealing to us the existence of subterranean lakes and rivers 
sometimes superposed one above another in successive sheets j but the still 
more important subject of the absorption of water by earth and its trans¬ 
mission by infiltration is yet wrapped in great obscurity. 


410 


LATERAL EMBANKMENTS. 


inexhaustible stores of the richest soil, and spread them out in 
plains above the reach of ordinary floods.* 

Consequences if the Nile had been Diked, 

If a system of continuous lateral dikes, like those of the Po, 
had been adopted in Egypt in the early dynasties, when the 
power and the will to undertake the most stupendous material 
enterprises were so eminently characteristic of the government 
of that country, and the waters of the annual inundation con¬ 
sequently prevented from flooding the land, it is conceivable 
that the productiveness of the small area of cultivable soil in 
the Nile valley might have been long kept up by artificial irri¬ 
gation and the application of manures. But nature would 
have rebelled at last, and centuries before our time the mighty 
river would have burst the fetters by which impotent man had 
vainly striven to bind his swelling floods, the fertile fields ot 
Egypt would have been converted into dank morasses, and 
then, perhaps, in some distant future, when the expulsion of 
man should have allowed the gradual restoration of the prim¬ 
itive equilibrium, would be again transformed into luxuriant 
garden and plough land. Fortunately, the “ wisdom of Egypt ” 
taught her children better things. They invited and welcomed, 
not repulsed, the slimy embraces of Nilus, and his favors have 
been, from the hoariest antiquity, the greatest material bless¬ 
ing ever bestowed upon a people.f 

* The sediment of the Po has tilled up some lagoons and swamps in its 
delta, and converted them into comparatively dry land; hut, on the other 
hand, the retardation of the current from the lengthening of its course, and 
the diminution of its velocity by the deposits at its mouth, have forced its 
waters at some higher points to spread in spite of embankments, and thus 
fertile fields have been turned into unhealthy and unproductive marshes.— 
See Bottee, Sulla condizione dei Terreni Maremmani nel Ferrarese. An- 
nali di Agricoltura, etc., Fasc. v, 1863. 

t Deep borings have not detected any essential difference in the quan¬ 
tity or quality of the deposits of the Nile for forty or fifty, or, as some 
compute, for a hundred centuries. From what vast store of rich earth 
does this river derive the three or four inches of fertilizing material which 


EMBANKMENTS OF THE TO. 


411 


Tlie valley of the Po has probably not been cultivated or 
inhabited so dong as that of the Nile, but embankments have 
been employed on its lower course for at least two thousand 
years, and for many centuries they have been connected in a 
continuous chain. I have pointed out in a former chapter the 
effects produced on the geography of the Adriatic by the de¬ 
posit of river sediment in the sea at the mouths of the Po, the 
Adige, and the Brenta. If these rivers had been left uncon¬ 
fined, like the Nile, and allowed to spread their muddy waters 
at will, according to the laws of nature, the slime they have 
carried to the coast would have been chiefly distributed over the 
plains ol Lombardy. Their banks would have risen as fast as 
their beds, the coast line would not have been extended so far 
into the Adriatic, and, the current of the streams being conse¬ 
quently shorter, the inclination of their channel and the 
rapidity of their flow would not have been so greatly dimin¬ 
ished. Had man spared a reasonable proportion of the forests 
of the Alps, and not attempted to control the natural drainage 
of the surface, the Po would resemble the Nile in all its essen¬ 
tial characteristics, and, in spite of the difference of climate, 
perhaps be regarded as the friend and ally, not the enemy and 
the invader, of the population which dwells upon its banks.* 

it spreads over the soil of Egypt every hundred years. Not from the 
White Nile, for that river drops nearly all its suspended matter in the 
broad expansions and slow current of its channel south of the tenth degree 
of north latitude. Nor does it appear that much sediment is contributed 
by the Bahr-el-Azrek, which flows through forests for a great part of its 
course. I have been informed by an old European resident of Egypt, who 
is very familiar with the Upper Nile, that almost the whole of the earth 
with which its waters are charged is brought down by the Takazz6. 

* It is very probably true that, as Lombardini supposes, the plain of 
Lombardy was anciently covered with forests and morasses (Baumgarten, 
1. c. p. 156) ; but, had the Po remained unconfined, its deposits would have 
raised its banks as fast as its bed, and there is no obvious reason why this 
plain should be more marshy than other alluvial flats traversed by great 
rivers. Its lower course would probably have become more marshy than 
at present, but the banks of its middle and upper course would have been 
in a better condition for agricultural use than they now are. 


412 


DEPOSITS OF THE KILE. 


The Nile is larger than all the rivers of Lombardy to¬ 
gether/ it drains a basin twenty times as extensive, its banks 
have been occupied by man probably twice as long. But its 
geographical character has not been much changed in the 
whole period of recorded history, and, though its outlets have 
somewhat fluctuated in number and position, its historically 
known encroachments upon the sea are trifling compared with 
those of the Po and the neighboring streams. The deposits of 
the Nile are naturally greater in Upper than in Lower Egypt. 
They are found to have raised the soil at Thebes about seven 
feet within the last seventeen hundred years, and in the Delta 
the rise has been certainly more than half as great. 

We shall, therefore, not exceed the truth if we suppose the 
annually inundated surface of Egypt to have been elevated, 
upon an average, ten feet, within the last 5,000 years, or twice 
and a half the period during which the history of the Po is 
known to us.f 

We may estimate the present actually cultivated area of 
Egypt at about 5,500 square statute miles. As I have com¬ 
puted in a note on page 372, that area is not more than half 
as extensive as under the dynasties of the Pharaohs and the 
Ptolemies; for—though, in consequence of the elevation of 
the river bed, the inundations now have a wider natural 
spread—the industry of the ancient Egyptians conducted the 

* From daily measurements during a period of fourteen years—1827 to 
1840—the mean delivery of the Po at Ponte Lagoscuro, below the entrance 
of its last tributary, is found to he 1,720 cubic metres, or 60,745 cubic feet, 
per second. Its smallest delivery is 186 cubic metres, or 6,569 cubic feet, 
its greatest 5,156 cubic metres, or 182,094 cubic feet.— Baumgakten, follow¬ 
ing Lombakdini, volume before cited, p. 159. 

The average delivery of the Nile being 101,000 cubic feet per second, it 
follows that the Po contributes to the Adriatic six tenths as much water as 
the Nile to the Mediterranean—a result which will surprise most readers. 

t We are quite safe in supposing that the valley of the Nile has been 
occupied by man at least 5,000 years. The dates of Egyptian chronology 
are uncertain, but I believe no inquirer estimates the age of the great pyra¬ 
mids at less than forty centuries, and the construction of such works im¬ 
plies an already ancient civilization. 


413 


EFFECTS OF EMBANKING THE NILE. 

Nile water over a great extent of soil it does not now reach. 
We may, then, adopt a mean between the two quantities, and 
we shall probably come near the truth if we assume the con¬ 
venient number of 7,920 square statute miles as the average 
measure of the inundated land during the historical period. 
Taking the deposit on this surface at ten feet, the river sedi¬ 
ment let fall on the soil of Egypt within the last fifty centuries 
would amount to fifteen cubic miles. 

Had the Nile been banked in, like the Po, all this deposit, 
except that contained in the water diverted by canals or other¬ 
wise drawn from the river for irrigation and other purposes, 
would have been carried out to sea.* This would have been 
a considerable quantity; for the Nile holds earth in suspen¬ 
sion even at low water, a much larger proportion during the 
flood, and irrigation must have been carried on during the 
whole year. The precise amount which would have been thus 
distributed over the soil is matter of conjecture, but three 
cubic miles is certainly a liberal estimate. This would leave 
twelve cubic miles as the quantity which embankments would 
have compelled the Nile to transport to the Mediterranean over 
and above what it has actually deposited in that sea. The 
Mediterranean is shoal for some miles out to sea along the 
whole coast of the Delta, and the large bays or lagoons within 
the coast line, which communicate both with the river and the 
sea, have little depth of water. These lagoons the river deposits 
would have filled up, and there would still have been surplus 
earth enough to extend the Delta far into the Mediterranean.! 

* There are many dikes in Egypt, but they are employed in but a very 
few cases to exclude the waters of the inundation. Their office is to retain 
the water received at high Nile into the inclosures formed by them until it 
shall have deposited its sediment or been drawn out for irrigation; and 
they serve also as causeways for interior communication during the floods. 
The Egyptian dikes, therefore, instead of forcing the river, like those of 
the Po, to transport its sediment to the sea, help to retain the slime, which, 
if the flow of the current over the land were not obstructed, might be car¬ 
ried back into the channel, and at last to the Mediterranean. 

t The Mediterranean front of the Delta may be estimated at one hun¬ 
dred and fifty miles in length. Two cubic miles of earth would more than 


414 


DEPOSITS OF THE TUSCAN EIVEK9. 


Deposits of the Tuscan Rivers, 

The Arno, and all the rivers rising on the western slopes 
and spurs of the Apennines, carry down immense quantities 
of mud to the Mediterranean. There can be no doubt that the 
volume of earth so transported is very much greater than it 
would have been had the soil about the headwaters of those 
rivers continued to be protected from wash by forests; and 
there is as little question that the quantity borne out to sea 
by the rivers of Western Italy is much increased by artifi¬ 
cial embankments, because they are thereby prevented from 
spreading over the surface the sedimentary matter with which 
they are charged. The western coast of Tuscany has advanced 
some miles seaward within a very few centuries. The bed of 
the sea, for a long distance, has been raised, and of course the 
relative elevation of the land above it lessened ; harbors have 
been filled up and destroyed; long lines of coast dunes have 
been formed, and the diminished inclination of the beds of the 
rivers near their outlets has caused their waters to overflow 
their banks and convert them into pestilential marshes. The 
territorial extent of Western Italy has thus been considerably 
increased, but the amount of soil habitable and cultivable by 
man has been, in a still higher proportion, diminished. The 
coast of ancient Etruria was filled with great commercial 
towns, and their rural environs were occupied by a large and 
prosperous population. But maritime Tuscany has long been 
one of the most unhealthy districts in Christendom; the 
famous mart of Populonia has not an inhabitant; the coast is 

fill up the lagoons on the coast, and the remaining ten, even allowing the 
mean depth of the water to be twenty fathoms, which is beyond the truth, 
would have been sufficient to extend the coast line about three miles far¬ 
ther seaward, and thus, including the land gained by the filling up of the 
lagoons, to add more than five hundred square miles to the area of Egypt. 
Nor is this all; for the retardation of the current, by lengthening the 
course and consequently diminishing the inclination of the channel, would 
have increased the deposit of suspended matter, and proportionally aug¬ 
mented the total effect of the embankment. 


DEPOSITS OF THE TUSCAN RIVERS 


415 


almost absolutely depopulated, and tbe malarious fevers have 
extended their ravages far into the interior. 

These results are certainly not to be ascribed wholly to 
human action. They are, in a large proportion, due to geo¬ 
logical causes over which man has no control. The soil of 
much of Tuscany becomes pasty, almost fluid even, as soon as 
it is moistened, and when thoroughly saturated with water, it 
flows like a river. Such a soil as this would not be completely 
protected by woods, and, indeed, it would now be difficult to 
confine it long enough to allow it to cover itself with forest 
vegetation. Nevertheless, it certainly was once chiefly wooded, 
and the rivers which flow through it must then have been 
much less charged with earthy matter than at present, and 
they must have carried into the sea a smaller proportion of 
their sediment when they were free to deposit it on their banks 
than since they have been confined by dikes.* 

* For the convenience of navigation, and to lessen the danger of inun¬ 
dation by giving greater directness, and, of course, rapidity to the current, 
bends in rivers are sometimes cut off and winding channels made straight. 
This process has the same general effects as diking, and therefore cannot 
be employed without many of the same results. 

This practice has often been resorted to on the Mississippi with advan¬ 
tage to navigation, but it is quite another question whether that advantage 
has not been too dearly purchased by the injury to the banks at lower 
points. If we suppose a river to have a navigable course of 1,600 miles 
as measured by its natural channel, with a descent of 800 feet, we shall 
have a fall of six inches to the mile. If the length of channel be reduced 
to 1,200 miles by cutting off bends, the fall is increased to eight inches per 
mile. The augmentation of velocity consequent upon this increase of in¬ 
clination is not computable without taking into account other elements, 
such as depth and volume of water, diminution of direct resistance, and 
the like, but in almost any supposable case, it would be sufficient to 
produce great effects on the height of floods, the deposit of sediment in 
the channel, on the shores, and at the outlet, the erosion of banks and 
other points of much geographical importance. 

The Po, in those parts of its course where the embankments leave 
a wide space between, often cuts off bends in its channel and straightens 
its course. These short cuts are called salti, or leaps, and sometimes 
reduce the distance between their termini by several miles. In 1777, the 
ealto of Cottaro shortened a distance of 7,000 metres by 5,000, or, in other 


416 


PHYSICAL RESTORATION IN TUSCANY. 


It is, in general, true, tliat the intervention of man has 
hitherto seemed to insure the final exhaustion, ruin, and deso¬ 
lation of every province of nature which he has reduced to his 
dominion. Attila was only giving an energetic and pictu¬ 
resque expression to the tendencies of human action, as per¬ 
sonified in himself, when he said that u no grass grew where 
his horse’s hoofs had trod.” The instances are few, where a 
second civilization has flourished upon the ruins ot an ancient 
culture, and lands once rendered uninhabitable by human acts 
or neglect have generally been forever abandoned as hope¬ 
lessly irreclaimable. It is, as I have before remarked, a ques¬ 
tion of vast importance, how far it is practicable to restore the 
garden we have wasted, and it is a problem on which expe¬ 
rience throws little light, because few deliberate attempts have 
yet been made at the work of physical regeneration, on a scale 
large enough to warrant general conclusions in any one class 
of cases. 

The valleys and shores of Tuscany form, however, a striking 
exception to this remark. The success w T ith which human 
guidance has made the operations of nature herself available 
for the restoration of her disturbed harmonies, in the Yal di 
Chiana and the Tuscan Maremma, is among the noblest, if not 
the most brilliant achievements of modern engineering, and, 
regarded in all its bearings on the great question of which I 
have just spoken, it is, as an example, of more importance to 
the general interests of humanity than the proudest work of 
internal improvement that mechanical means have yet con¬ 
structed. The operations in the Yal di Chiana have consisted 
chiefly in so regulating the flow of the surface waters into and 
through it, as to compel them to deposit their sedimentary 
matter at the will of the engineers, and thereby to raise 
grounds rendered insalubrious and unfit for agricultural use 
by stagnating water; the improvements in the Maremma have 
embraced both this method of elevating the level of the soil, 

words, reduced tlie length of the channel more than three miles ; and in 
1807 and 1810 the two salti of Mezzanone effected a reduction of distance 
to the amount of between seven and eight miles.— Baumgarten, 1. c. p. 188. 


TIIE YAL DI CHIAN A. 


417 

and the prevention of the mixture of salt water with fresh in 
the coast marshes and shallow bays., which is a very active 
cause of the development of malarious influences.* 

Improvements in the Val di Chiana. 

For twenty miles or more after the remotest headwaters of 
the Arno have united to form a considerable stream, this river 
flows southeastward to the vicinity of Arezzo. It here sweeps 
round to the northwest, and follows that course to near its 
junction with the Sieve, a few miles above Florence, from 
which point its general direction is westward to the sea. From 
the bend at Arezzo, a depression called the Yal di Chiana runs 
southeastward until it strikes into the valley of the Paglia, a 
tributary of the Tiber, and thus connects the basin of the latter 
river with that of the Arno. In the Middle Ages, and down to 
the eighteenth century, the Yal di Chiana was often over¬ 
flowed and devastated by the torrents which poured down 
from the highlands, transporting great quantities of slime with 
their currents, stagnating upon its surface, and gradually con¬ 
verting it into a marshy and unhealthy district, which was at 
last very greatly reduced in population and productiveness. 
It had, in fact, become so desolate that even the swallow had 
deserted it.f 

* The fact, that the mixing of salt and fresh water in coast marshes and 
lagoons is deleterious to the sanitary condition of the vicinity, seems almost 
universally admitted, though the precise reason why a mixture of both 
should be more injurious than either alone, is not altogether clear. It has 
been suggested that the admission of salt water to the lagoons and rivers 
kills many fresh water plants and animals, while the fresh water is equally 
fatal to many marine organisms, and that the decomposition of the remains 
originates poisonous miasmata. Other theories however have been pro¬ 
posed. The whole subject is fully and ably discussed by Dr. Salvagnoli 
Marchetti in the appendix to his valuable Rapport o sul Bonificamento dells 
Maremme Toscano. See also the ALcmovic Econonnco-Statistiche suite ALa- 
remme Toscane , of the same author. 

f This curious fact is thus stated in the preface to Fossombroni 
{Memorie sopra la Val di Chiana , edition of 1835, p. xiii), Irom whicn 
also I borrow most of the data hereafter given with respect to that valley: 
“ It is perhaps not universally known, that the swallows, which come from 
27 


418 


THE YAL DI CIII AN A. 


The bed of the Arno near Arezzo and that of the Paglia at 
the southern extremity of the Yal di Chiana did not differ 

the north [south] to spend the summer in our climate, do not frequent 
marshy districts with a malarious atmosphere. A proof of the restoration 
of salubrity in the Yal di Ohiana is furnished by these aerial visitors, which 
had never before been seen in those low grounds, but which have appeared 
within a few years at Forano and other points similarly situated.” 

Is the air of swamps destructive to the swallows, or is their absence in 
such localities merely doe to the want of human habitations, near which 
this half-domestic bird loves to breed, perhaps because the house fly and 
other insects which follow man are found only in the vicinity of his 
dwellings ? 

In almost all European countries, the swallow is protected, by popular 
opinion or superstition, from the persecution to which almost all other birds 
are subject. It is possible that this respect for the swallow is founded 
upon ancient observation of the fact just stated on the authority of Fos- 
sombroni. Ignorance mistakes the effect for the cause, and the absence of 
this bird may have been supposed to be the occasion, not the consequence, 
of the unhealthiness of particular localities. This opinion once adopted, 
the swallow would become a sacred bird, and in process of time fables and 
legends would be invented to give additional sanction to the prejudices 
which protected it. The Eomans considered the swallow as consecrated 
to the Penates, or household gods, and according to Peretti ( Le Serate del 
Villaggio , p. 168) the Lombard peasantry think it a sin to kill them, be¬ 
cause they are le gallinelle del Signore, the chickens of the Lord. 

The following little Tuscan rispetto from Gradi (Racconti Popolari , p. 
33) well expresses the feeling of the peasantry toward this bird: 

O rondinella che passi lo mare 
Torna ’ndietro, vo 1 dirti du’ parole; 

Dammi ’na penna delle tue bell’ ale, 

Vo 1 scrivere ’na lettera al mi’ amore; 

E quando 1’ avro scritta ’n carta bella, 

Ti renderd la penna, o rondinella; 

E quando 1’ avro scritta ’n carta bianca, 

Ti renderd la penna cbe ti manca; 

E quando 1’ avro scritta in carta d’ oro, 

Ti renderd la penna al tuo bel volo. 

O swallow, that fliest beyond the sea, 

Turn back 1 I would fain have a word with thoe. 

A feather oh grant, from thy wing so bright! 

For I to my sweetheart a letter would write ; 

And when it is written on paper fine 

I’ll give thee, O swallow, that feather of thine; 

—On paper so white, and I’ll give thee back, 

O pretty swallow, the pen thou dost lack ; 

—On paper of gold, and then I’ll restore 
To thy beautiful pinion the feather once more. 


THE VAL DI CHIANA. 


419 


much in level. The general inclination of the valley was 
therefore small; it does not appear to have ever been divided 
into opposite slopes by a true watershed, and the position of 
the summit seems to have shifted according to the varying 
amount and place of deposit of the sediment brought down 
by the lateral streams which emptied into it. The length of 
its principal channel of drainage, and even the direction of its 
flow at any given point, were therefore fluctuating. Hence, 
much difference of opinion was entertained at different times 
with regard to the normal course of this stream, and, conse¬ 
quently, to the question whether it was to be regarded as prop¬ 
erly an affluent of the Tiber or of the Arno. 

The bed of the latter river at the bend has been eroded to 
the depth of thirty or forty feet, and that, apparently, at no 
very remote period. If it were elevated to what was evidently 
its original height, the current of the Arno would be so much 
above that of the Paglia as to allow of a regular flow from its 
channel to the latter stream, through the Yal di Chiana, pro¬ 
vided the bed of the valley had remained at the level which 
excavations prove it to have had a few centuries ago, before it 
was raised by the deposits I have mentioned. These facts, 
together with the testimony of ancient geographers which 
scarcely admits of any other explanation, are thought to prove 
that all the waters of the Upper Arno were originally dis¬ 
charged through the Yal di Chiana into the Tiber, and that a 
part of them still continued to flow, at least occasionally, in 
that direction down to the days of the Roman empire, and 
perhaps for some time later. The depression of the bed of the 
Arno, and the raising of that of the valley by the deposits of 
the lateral torrents and of the Arno itself, finally cut off the 
branch of the river which had flowed to the Tiber, and all its 

Popular traditions and superstitions are so closely connected with local¬ 
ities, that, though an emigrant people may carry them to a foreign land, 
they seldom survive a second generation. The swallow, however, is still 
protected in New England by prejudices of transatlantic origin; and I 
remember hearing, in my childhood, that if the swallows were killed, the 
cows would give bloody milk. 


420 


THE YAL DI Oil IAN A. 


waters were turned into its present channel, though the prin¬ 
cipal drainage of the Val di Chiana appears to have been in a 
southeastwardly direction until within a comparatively recent 
period. 

In the sixteenth century, the elevation of the bed of the 
valley had become so considerable, that in 1551, at a point 
about ten miles south of the Arno, it was found to be not less 
than one hundred and thirty feet above that river; then fol¬ 
lowed a level of ten miles, and . then a continuous descent to 
the Paglia. Along the level portion of the valley was a boat- 
able channel, and lakes, sometimes a mile or even two miles 
in breadth, had formed at various points farther south. At 
this period, the drainage of the summit level might easily 
have been determined in either direction, and the opposite 
descents of the valley made to culminate at the north or at the 
south end of the level. In the former case, the watershed 
would have been ten miles south of the Arno; in the latter, 
twenty miles, and the division would have been not very 
unequal. 

Various schemes were suggested at this time for drawing 
off the stagnant waters, as well as for the future regular drain¬ 
age of the valley, and small operations for those purposes were 
undertaken with partial success ; but it was feared that the 
discharge of the accumulated waters into the Tiber would pro¬ 
duce a dangerous inundation, while the diversion of the drain¬ 
age into the Arno would increase the violence of the floods to 
which that river was very subject, and no decisive steps were 
taken. In 1606, an engineer whose name has not been pre¬ 
served proposed, as the only possible method of improvement, 
the piercing of a tunnel through the hills bounding the valley 
on the west to convey its waters to the Ombrone, but the 
expense and other objections prevented the adoption of this 
project.* The fears of the Roman Government for the security 
of the valley of the Tiber had induced it to construct barriers 
across that part of the channel which lay within its territory, 


* Moeozzi, Dello stato antico c moderno delfiumc Arno, ii, p. 42. 


THE YAL DI CHI AN A. 


421 


and these obstructions, though not specifically intended for 
that purpose, naturally promoted the deposit of sediment and 
the elevation of the bed of the valley in their neighborhood. 
The effect of this measure and of the continued spontaneous 
action of the torrents was, that the northern slope, which in 
1551 had commenced at the distance of ten miles from the 
Arno, was found in 1605 to begin nearly thirty miles south of 
that river, and in 1645 it had been removed about six miles 
farther in the same direction.* 

In the seventeenth century, the Tuscan and Papal Govern¬ 
ments consulted Galileo, Torricelli, Castelli, Cassini, Viviani, 
and other distinguished philosophers and engineers, on the pos¬ 
sibility of reclaiming the valley by a regular artificial drainage. 
Most of these eminent physicists were of opinion that the 
measure was impracticable, though not altogether for the same 
reasons; hut they seem to have agreed in thinking that the 
opening of such channels, in either direction, as would give the 
current a flow sufficiently rapid to drain the lands properly, 
would dangerously augment the inundations of the river— 
whether the Tiber or the Arno—into which the waters should 
he turned. The general improvement of the valley was now 
for a long time abandoned, and the waters were allowed to 
spread and stagnate until carried off by partial drainage, infil¬ 
tration, and evaporation. Torricelli had contended that the 
slope of a large part of the valley was too small to allow it to 
be drained by ordinary methods, and that no practicable depth 
and width of canal would suffice for that purpose. It could 
be laid dry, he thought, only by converting its surface into an 
inclined plane, and he suggested that this might be accom¬ 
plished by controlling the flow of the numerous torrents which 
pour into it, so as to force them to deposit their sediment at 
the pleasure of the engineer, and, consequently, to elevate the 
level of the area over which it should he spread.f This plan 

* Mop.ozzo, Dello stato, etc., delVArno, ii, pp. 39, 40. 

t Torricelli thus expressed himself on this point: “ If we content our¬ 
selves with what nature has made practicable to human industry, we shall 
endeavor to control, as far as possible, the outlets of these streams, which, 


422 


THE YAL DI CHIAJSfA. 


did not meet with immediate general acceptance, but it was 
soon adopted for local purposes at some points in the southern 
part of the valley, and it gradually grew in public favor and 
was extended in application until its final triumph a hundred 
years later. 

In spite of these encouraging successes, however, the fear 
of danger to the valley of the Arno and the Tiber, and the 
difficulty of an agreement between Tuscany and Home—the 
boundary between which states crossed the Yal di Chiana not 
far from the halfway point between the two rivers—and of 
reconciling other conflicting interests, prevented the resump¬ 
tion of the projects for the general drainage of the valley until 
after the middle of the eighteenth century. In the mean time 
the science of hydraulics had become better understood, and 
the establishment of the natural law according to which the 
velocity of a current of water, and of course the proportional 
quantity discharged by it in a given time, are increased by 
increasing its mass, had diminished if not dissipated the fear 
of exposing the banks of the Arno to greater danger from 
inundations by draining the Yal di Chiana into it. 

The suggestion of Torricelli was finally adopted as the basis 
of a comprehensive system of improvement, and it was decided 
to continue and extend the inversion of the original flow of the 
waters, and to turn them into the Arno from a point as far to 
the south as should be found practicable. The conduct of the 
works was committed to a succession of able engineers who, 
for a long series of years, were under the general direction of 
the celebrated philosopher and statesman Fossombroni, and the 
success has fully justified the expectations of the most sanguine 
advocates of the scheme. The plan of improvement embraced 
two branches : the one, the removal of certain obstructions in 
the bed of the Arno, and, consequently, the further depression 
of the channel of that river, in certain places, with the view 

by raising the bed of the valley with their deposits, will realize the fable 
of the Tagus and the Pactolus, and truly roll golden sands for him that is 
wise enough to avail himself of them.”— Fossombroni, Memorie sopra la 
Val di Chiana , p. 210. 


THE VAL DI CHIANA. 


423 


of increasing the rapidity of its current; the other, the gradual 
tilling up of the ponds and swamps, and raising of the lower 
grounds of the Yal di Chiana, by directing to convenient 
points the flow of the streams which pour down into it, and 
there confining their waters by temporary dams until the sedi¬ 
ment was deposited where it was needed. The economical 
result of these operations has been, that in 1835 an area of 
more than four hundred and fifty square miles of pond, marsh, 
and damp-sickly low grounds had been converted into fer¬ 
tile, healthy and well-drained soil, and, consequently, that so 
much territory has been added to the agricultural domain 
of Tuscany. 

But in our present view of the subject, the geographical 
revolution which has been accomplished is still more interest¬ 
ing. The climatic influence of the elevation and draining of 
the soil must have been considerable, though I do not know 
that an increase or a diminution of the mean temperature or 
precipitation in the valley has been established by meteoro¬ 
logical observation. There is, however, in the improvement 
of the sanitary condition of the Yal di Chiana, which was for¬ 
merly extremely unhealthy, satisfactory proof of a beneficial 
climatic change. The fevers, which not only decimated the 
population of the low grounds' but infested the adjacent hills, 
have ceased their ravages, and are now not more frequent than 
in other parts of Tuscany. The strictly topographical effect 
of the operations in question, besides the conversion of marsh 
into dry surface, has been the inversion of the inclination of 
the valley for a distance of thirty-five miles, so that this great 
plain which, within a comparatively short period, sloped and 
drained its waters to the south, now inclines and sends its 
drainage to the north. The reversal of the currents of the 
valley has added to the Arno a new tributary equal to the 
largest of its former affluents, and a most important circum¬ 
stance connected with this latter fact is, that the increase of 
the volume of its waters lias accelerated their velocity in a still 
greater proportion, and, instead of augmenting the danger from 
its inundations, has almost wholly obviated that source of 


424 


THE TUSCAN MAREMMA. 


apprehension. Between the beginning of the fifteenth century 
and the year 17G1, thirty-one destructive floods of the Arno 
are recorded ; between 1761, when the principal streams of the 
Yal di Chiana were diverted into that river, and 1835, not 
one.* 


Improvements in the Tuscan Alaremme. 

In the improvements of the Tuscan Maremma, more formi¬ 
dable difficulties have been encountered. The territory to be 
reclaimed was more extensive; the salubrious places of retreat 
for laborers and inspectors were more remote; the courses ol 
the rivers to be controlled were longer and their natural in¬ 
clination less rapid; some of them, rising in wooded regions, 
transported comparatively little earthy matter,f and above all, 

* Arrian observes that at the junction of the Hydaspes and the Acesines, 
both of which are described as wide streams, “ one very narrow river is 
formed of two confluents, and its current is very swift.”— Arrian, Alex. 
Anab ., vi, 4. 

A like example is observed in the Anapus near Syracuse, which, below 
the junction of its two branches, is narrower, though swifter than either 
of them, and such cases are by no means unfrequent. The immediate 
effect of the confluence of two rivers upon the current below depends 
upon local circumstances, and especially upon the angle of incidence. 
If the two nearly coincide in direction, so as to include a small angle, the 
joint current will have a greater velocity than the slower confluent, per- 
haps even than either of them. If the two rivers run in transverse, still 
more if they flow in more or less opposite directions, the velocity of the 
principal branch will be retarded both above and below the junction, and 
at high water it may even set back the current of the affluent. 

On the other hand, the diversion of a considerable branch from a river 
retards its velocity below the point of separation, and here a deposit of 
earth in its channel immediately begins, which has a tendency to turn the 
whole stream into the new bed. “ Theory and the authority of all hydro- 
graphical writers combine to show that the channels of rivers undergo an 
elevation of bed below a canal of diversion.”—Letter of Fossombeoni, in 
Salvagnoli, Raccolta di Documenti , p. 32. See the early authorities and dis¬ 
cussions on the principle stated in the text, in Frisi, Del modo di regolare i 
Fiumi e i Torrenti , libro iii, capit. i. 

t This difficulty has been remedied as to one important river of the 
Maremma, the Pecora, by clearings recently executed along its upper 


THE TUSCAN MAREMMA. 


m 


the coast, which is a recent deposit of the waters, is little 
elevated above the sea, and admits into its lagoons and the 
months of its rivers floods of salt water with every western 
wind, every rising tide.* 

The western coast of Tuscany is not supposed to have been 
an unhealthy region before the conquest of Etruria by the 
Romans, but it certainly became so within a few centuries 
after that event. This was a natural consequence of the neg¬ 
lect or wanton destruction of the public improvements, and 
especially the hydraulic works in which the Etruscans were so 
skilful, and of the felling of the upland forests, to satisfy the 
demand for w T ood at Rome for domestic, industrial, and mil¬ 
itary purposes. After the downfall of the Roman empire, the 
incursions of the barbarians, and then feudalism, foreign dom 
ination, intestine wars, and temporal and spiritual tyrannies, 

course. “ The condition of this marsh and of its affluents are now, No¬ 
vember, 1859, much changed, and it is advisable to prosecute its improve¬ 
ment by deposits. In consequence of the extensive felling of the woods 
upon the plains, hills, and mountains of the territory of Massa and Scarlino, 
within the last ten years, the Pecora aud other affluents of the marsh 
receive, during the rains, water abundantly charged with slime, so that 
the deposits within the first division of the marsh are already considerable, 
and we may now hope to see the whole marsh and pond filled up in a much 
shorter time than we had a right to expect before 1850. This circumstance 
totally changes the terms of the question, because the filling of the marsh 
and pond, which then seemed almost impossible on account of the small 
amount of sediment deposited by the Pecora, has now become practicable.” 
—Salvagnoli, Bapporto ml Boniftcamento delle Maremme Toscane , pp. 
li, lii. 

The annual amount of sediment brought down by the rivers of the 
Maremma is computed at more than 12,000,000 cubic yards, or enough to 
raise an area of four square miles one yard. Between 1830 and 1859 more 
than three times that quantity was deposited in the marsh and shoal water 
lake of Castiglione alone.— Salvagnoli, Baccolta di Document i, pp. 74, 75. 

* The tide rises ten inches on the coast of Tuscany. See Memoir by 
Fantoni, in the appendix to Salvagnoli, Bapporto , p. 189. 

On the tides of the Mediterranean, see Bottger, Das Mittelmeer , p. 190. 
Not having Admiral Smyth’s Mediterranean—on which Bottger’s work is 
founded—at hand, I do not know how far credit is due to the former author 
for the matter contained in the chapter referred to. 


426 


THE TUSCAN MAREMMA. 


aggravated still more cruelly the moral and physical evils 
which Tuscany and the other Italian States were doomed to 
suffer, and from which they have enjoyed but brief respites 
during the whole period of modern history. The Maremma 
was already proverbially unhealthy in the time ot Dante, who 
refers to the fact in several familiar passages, and the petty 
tyrants upon its borders often sent criminals to places of con¬ 
finement in its territory, as a slow but certain mode ol execu¬ 
tion. Ignorance of the causes of the insalubrity, and often the 
interference of private rights, “ prevented the adoption of meas¬ 
ures to remove it, and the growing political and commercial 
importance of the large towns in more healthful localities 
absorbed the attention of Government, and deprived the Ma¬ 
remma of its just share in the systems of physical improvement 
which were successfully adopted in interior and Northern Italy. 

Before any serious attempts were made to drain or fill up 
the marshes of the Maremme, various other sanitary exper¬ 
iments were tried. It was generally believed that the insa¬ 
lubrity of the province was the consequence, not the cause, 
of its depopulation, and that, if it were once densely inhab¬ 
ited, the ordinary operations of agriculture, and especially the 

* In Catholic countries, the discipline of the church requires a meagre 
diet at certain seasons, and as fish is not flesh, there is a great demand for 
that article of food at those periods. For the convenience of monasteries 
and their patrons, and as a source of pecuniary emolument to ecclesiastical 
establishments and sometimes to lay proprietors, great numbers of artificial 
fish ponds were created during the Middle Ages. They were generally 
shallow pools formed by damming up the outlet of marshes, and they were 
among the most fruitful sources of endemic disease, and of the peculiar 
malignity of the epidemics which so often ravaged Europe in those cen¬ 
turies. These ponds, in religious hands, were too sacred to be infringed 
upon for sanitary purposes, and when belonging to powerful lay lords they 
were almost as inviolable. The rights of fishery were a standing obstacle 
to every proposal of hydraulic improvement, and to this day large and 
fertile districts in Southern Europe remain sickly and almost unimproved 
and uninhabited, because the draining of the ponds upon them would 
reduce the income of proprietors who derive large profits by supplying the 
faithful, in Lent, with fish, and with various species of waterfowl which, 
though very fat, are, ecclesiastically speaking, meagre. 


THE TUSCAN MAREMMA. 


427 


maintenance of numerous domestic fires, would restore it to its 
ancient healthfulness.* In accordance with these views, set¬ 
tlers were invited from various parts of Italy, from Greece, 
and, after the accession of the Lorraine princes, from that 
country also, and colonized in the Maremme. To strangers 
coming from soils and sides so unlike those of the Tuscan 
marshes, the climate was more fatal than to the inhabitants of 
the neighboring districts, whose constitutions had become in 
some degree inured to the local influences, or who at least 
knew better how to guard against them. The consequence 
very naturally was that the experiment totally failed to pro¬ 
duce the desired effects, and was attended with a great sacri¬ 
fice of life and a heavy loss to the treasury of the state. 

The territory known as the Tuscan Maremma, ora marl- 
tima , or Maremme—for the plural form is most generally used 
—lies upon and near the western coast of Tuscany, and com¬ 
prises about 1,900 square miles English, of which 500 square 
miles, or 320,000 acres, are plain and marsh including 45,500 
acres of water surface, and about 290,000 acres are forest. 
One of the mountain peaks, that of Mount Amiata, rises to the 
height of 6,280 feet. The mountains of the Maremma are 
healthy, the lower hills much less so, as the malaria is felt at 
some points at the height of 1,000 feet, and the plains, with 
the exception of a few localities favorably situated on the sea- 
coast, are in a high degree pestilential. The fixed population 
is about 80,000, of whom one sixth live on the plains in the 
winter and about one tenth in the summer. Nine or ten thou¬ 
sand laborers come down from the mountains of the Maremma 
and the neighboring provinces into the plain, during the latter 
season, to cultivate and gather the crops. 

Out of this small number of inhabitants and strangers, 
35,619 were ill enough to require medical treatment between 
the 1st of June, 1840, and the 1st of June, 1841, and more 
than one half the cases were of intermittent, malignant, gas- 

* Macchiavelli advised the Government of Tuscany “ to provide that 
men should restore the wholesomeness of the soil by cultivation, and 
purify the air by fires.”— Salvagnoli, Memorie , p. 111. 


4:28 


IMPROVEMENTS IN LUCCA. 


trie, or catarrhal fever. Very few agricultural laborers escaped 
fever, though the disease did not always manifest itself until 
they had returned to the mountains. In the province of Gros- 
seto, which embraces nearly the whole of the Maremma, the 
annual mortality was 3.92 per cent, the average duration of 
life but 23.18 years, and 75 per cent, of the deaths were among 
persons engaged in agriculture. 

The filling up of the low grounds and the partial separa¬ 
tion of the waters of the sea and the land, which had been in 
progress since the year 1827, now began to show very decided 
effects upon the sanitary condition of the population. In the 
year ending June 1st, 1842, the number of the sick was re¬ 
duced by more than 2,000, and the cases of fever by more than 
4,000. The next year, the cases of fever fell to 10,500, and in 
that ending June 1st, 1844, to 9,200. The political events of 
1848 and the preceding and following years, occasioned the 
suspension of the works of improvement in the Maremma, but 
they were resumed after the revolution of 1859, and are now 
in successful progress. 

I have spoken, with some detail, of the improvements in 
the Val di Chiana and the Tuscan Maremma, because of their 
great relative importance, and because their history is well 
known; but like operations have been executed in the terri¬ 
tory of Pisa and upon the coast of the duchy of Lucca. In 
the latter case, they were confined principally to prevention 
of the intermixing of fresh water with that of the sea. In 
1741, sluices or lock gates were constructed for this purpose, 
and the following year, the fevers, which had been destructive 
to the coast population for a long time previous, disappeared 
altogether. In 1768 and 1769, the works having fallen to 
decay, the fevers returned in a very malignant form, but the 
rebuilding of the gates again restored the healthfulness of the 
shore. Similar facts recurred in 1784 and 1785, and again 
from 1804 to 1821. This long and repeated experience has at 
last impressed upon the people the necessity of vigilant atten¬ 
tion to the sluices, which are now kept in constant repair 
The health of the coast is uninterrupted, and Viareggio, the 


COLLATERAL EFFECTS OF WORKS IN VAL DI CHIAN A. 429 

capital town of the district, is now much frequented for its sea 
baths and its general salubrity, at a season when formerly it 
was justly shunned as the abode of disease and death.* 

It is now a hundred years since the commencement of the 
improvements in the Yal di Chiana, and those of the Ma- 
remma have been in more or less continued operation for 
above a generation. They have, as we have seen, produced 
important geographical changes in the surface of the earth 
and in the flow of considerable rivers, and their effects have 
been not less conspicuous in preventing other changes, of a 
deleterious character, which would infallibly have taken place 
if they had not been arrested by the improvements in ques¬ 
tion. It has been already stated that, in order to prevent the 
overflow of the valley of the Tiber by freely draining the Yal 
di Chiana into it, the Papal authorities, long before the com¬ 
mencement of the Tuscan works, constructed strong barriers 
near the southern end of the valley, which detained the waters 
of the wet season until they could be gradually drawn off into 
the Paglia. They consequently deposited most of tlieir sedi¬ 
ment in the Yal di Chiana and carried down comparatively 
little earth to the Tiber. The lateral streams contributing the 
largest quantities of sedimentary matter to the Yal di Chiana 
originally flowed into that valley near its northern end ; and 
the change of their channels and outlets in a southern direc¬ 
tion, so as to raise that part of the valley by their deposits and 
thereby reverse its drainage, was one of the principal steps in 
the process of improvement. 

We have seen that the north end of the Yal di Chiana 
near the Arno had been raised by spontaneous deposit of 
sediment to such a height as to interpose a sufficient ob¬ 
stacle to all flow in that direction. If, then, the Roman 
dam had not been erected, or the works of the Tuscan 
Government undertaken, the whole of the earth, which has 
been arrested by those works and employed to raise the bed 

* Gioegini, Sur les causes de VInsalubrite de Vair dans le voisinage des 
marais, etc., lue d VAcademic des Sciences d Paris, le 12 Juillet, 1825. Re¬ 
printed in Salvagnoli, Rapporto, etc., appendice, p. 5, et seqq. 


430 


RIVER MOUTHS. 


and reverse tlie declivity of the valley, would have been car¬ 
ried down to the Tiber and thence into the sea. The deposit 
thus created, would, of course, have contributed to increase 
the advance of the shore at the mouth of that river,which has 
long been going on at the rate of three metres and nine tenths 
(twelve feet and nine inches) per annum.* It is evident that 
a quantity of earth, sufficient to effect the immense changes I 
have described in a wide valley more than thirty miles long, 
if deposited at the outlet of the Tiber, would have very consid¬ 
erably modified the outline of the coast, and have exerted no 
unimportant influence on the flow of that river, by raising its 
point of discharge and lengthening its channel. 

The sediment washed into the marshes of the Maremme is 
not less than 12,000,000 cubic yards per annum. The escape 
of this quantity into the sea, wdiich is now almost wholly pre¬ 
vented, would be sufficient to advance the coast line fourteen 
yards per year, for a distance of forty miles, computing the 
mean depth of the sea near the shore at twelve yards. It is 
true that in this case, as well as in that of other rivers, the 
sedimentary matter would not be distributed equally along 
the shore, and much of it would be carried out into deep 
water, or perhaps transported by the currents to distant coasts. 
The immediate effects of the deposit, therefore, would not be 
so palpable as they appear in this numerical form, but they 
would be equally certain, and would infallibly manifest them¬ 
selves, first, perhaps, at some remote point, and afterward at 
or near the outlets of the rivers which produced them. 

Obstruction of River Mouths. 

The mouths of a large proportion of the streams known to 
ancient internal navigation are already blocked up by sand¬ 
bars or fluviatile deposits, and the maritime approaches to 
river harbors frequented by the ships of Phenicia and Car¬ 
thage and Greece and Pome are shoaled to a considerable 

* See the careful estimates of Roset, Moyens de forcer les Torrents , etc., 
pp. 42, 44. 


RIVER DEPOSITS. 


431 


distance out to sea. The inclination of almost every known 
river bed has been considerably reduced within the historical 
period, and nothing but great volume of water, or exceptional 
rapidity of flow, now enables a few large streams like the 
Amazon, the La Plata, the Ganges, and, in a less degree, the 
Mississippi, to carry their own deposits far enough out into 
deep water to prevent the formation of serious obstructions to 
navigation. But the degradation of their banks, and the 
transportation of earthy matter to the sea by their currents, 
are gradually filling up the estuaries even of these mighty 
floods, and unless the threatened evil shall be averted by the 
action of geological forces, or by artificial contrivances more 
efficient than dredging machines, the destruction of every har¬ 
bor in the world which receives a considerable river must 
inevitably take place at no very distant date. 

This result would, perhaps, have followed in some incal¬ 
culably distant future, if man had not come to inhabit the 
earth as soon as the natural forces which had formed its sur¬ 
face had arrived at such an approximate equilibrium that Ins 
existence on the globe was possible; but the general effect of 
his industrial operations has been to accelerate it immensely. 
Bivers, in countries planted by nature with forests and never 
inhabited by man, employ the little earth and gravel they 
transport chiefly to raise their own beds and to form plains in 
their basins.* In their upper course, where the current is 
swiftest, they are most heavily charged with coarse rolled or 
suspended matter, and this, in floods, they dej>osit on their 
shores in the mountain valleys where they rise; in their mid¬ 
dle course, a lighter earth is spread oyer the bottom of their 

* Rivers which transport sand, gravel, pebbles, heavy mineral matter 
m short, tend to raise their own beds; those charged only with fine, light 
earth, to cut them deeper. The prairie rivers of the West have deep 
channels, because the mineral matter they carry down is not heavy enough 
to resist the impulse of even a moderate current, and those tributaries of 
the Po which deposit their sediment in the lakes—the Ticino, the Adda, 
the Oglio, and the Mincio—flow, in deep cuts, for the same reason.— Baum- 
gaeten, 1 . c., p. 132. 


432 SAND BANKS-SEDIMENT OF THE NILE. 

widening basins, and forms plains of moderate extent; the fine 
silt wliioli floats farther is deposited over a still broader area, 
or, if carried out to sea, is, in great part quickly swept far off 
by marine currents and dropped at last in deep water. Man’s 
u improvement ” of the soil increases the erosion from its sur¬ 
face ; his arrangements for confining the lateral spread of the 
water in floods compel the rivers to transport to their mouths 
the earth derived from that erosion even in their upper course; 
and, consequently, the sediment they deposit at their outlets is 
not only much larger in quantity, but composed of heavier 
materials, which sink more readily to the bottom of the sea 
and are less easily removed by marine currents. 

The tidal movement of the ooean, deep sea currents, and 
the agitation of inland waters by the wind, lift up the sands 
strewn over the bottom by diluvial streams or sent down by 
mountain torrents, and throw them up on dry land, or deposit 
them in sheltered bays and nooks of the coast—for the flowing 
is stronger than the ebbing tide, the affluent than the refluent 
wave. This cause of injury to harbors it is not in man’s 
power to resist by any means at present available ; but, as we 
have seen, something can be done to prevent the degradation 
of high grounds, and to diminish the quantity of earth which 
is annually abstracted from the mountains, from table lands, 
and from river banks, to raise the bottom of the sea. 

This latter cause of harbor obstruction, though an active 
agent, is, nevertheless, in many cases, the less powerful of the 
two. The earth suspended in the lower course of fluviatile 
currents is lighter than sea sand, river water lighter than sea 
water, and hence, if a land stream enters the sea with a con¬ 
siderable volume, its water flows over that of the sea, and 
bears its slime with it until it lets it fall far from shore, or, as 
is more frequently the case, mingles with some marine current 
and transports its sediment to a remote point of deposit. The 
earth borne out of the mouths of the Nile is in part carried 
over the waves which throw up sea sand on the beach, and 
deposited in deep water, in part drifted by the current, which 
sweeps east and north along the coasts of Egypt and Syria, 


SEDIMENT OF THE NILE. 


438 


until it finds a resting place in the northeastern angle of the 
Mediterranean.* Thus the earth loosened by the rude Abys¬ 
sinian ploughshare, and washed down by the rain from the 
hills of Ethiopia which man has stripped of their protecting 
forests, contributes to raise the plains of Egypt, to shoal the 
maritime channels which lead to the city built by Alexander 
near the mouth of the Nile, and to fill up the harbors made 
famous by Phenician commerce. 

* 44 The stream carries this mud, &c., at first farther to the east, and 
only lets it fall where the force of the current becomes weakened. This 
explains the continual advance of the land seaward along the Syrian coast, 
in consequence of which Tyre and Sidon no longer lie on the shore, but 
some distance inland. That the Nile contributes to this deposit may easily 
be seen, even by the unscientific observer, from the stained and turbid 
character of the water for many miles from its mouths. A somewhat 
alarming phenomenon was observed in this neighborhood in 1801, on board 
the English frigate Romulus, Captain Culverhouse, on a voyage from Acre 
to Abukir. Dr. E. D. Clarke, who was a passenger on board this ship, 
thus describes it: 

“ 4 26th July.—To-day, Sunday, we accompanied the captain to the 
wardroom to dine, as usual, with his officers. "While we were at table, 
we heard the sailors who were throwing the lead suddenly cry out: 
44 Three and a half! ” The captain sprang up, was on deck in an instant, 
and, almost at the same moment, the ship slackened her way, and veered 
about. Every sailor on board supposed she would ground at once. Mean¬ 
while, however, as the ship came round, the whole surface of the water 
was seen to be covered with thick, black mud, which extended so far that 
it appeared like an island. At the same time, actual land was nowhere to 
be seen—not even from the masthead—nor was any notice of such a shoal 
to be found on any chart on board. The fact is, as we learned afterward, 
that a stratum of mud, stretching from the mouths of the Nile for many 
miles out into the open sea, forms a movable deposit along the Egyptian 
coast. If this deposit is driven forward by powerful currents, it some¬ 
times rises to the surface, and disturbs the mariner by the sudden appear¬ 
ance of shoals where the charts lead him to expect a considerable depth 
of water. But these strata of mud are, in reality, not in the least dangerous. 
As soon as a ship strikes them they break up at once, and a frigate may 
hold her course in perfect safety where an inexperienced pilot, misled by 
his soundings, would every moment expect to be stranded.’ ” — Bottger, 
T)as Mittelmeer, pp. 188, 189. 


* 


28 


SUBTERRANEAN WATERS. 


4 - 34 - 


Subterranean Waters. 

I have frequently alluded to a branch of geography, the 
importance of which is but recently adequately recognized— 
the subterranean waters of the earth considered as stationary 
reservoirs, as flowing currents, and as filtrating fluids. The 
earth drinks in moisture by direct absorption from the atmos¬ 
phere, by the deposition of dew, by rain and snow, by percola¬ 
tion from rivers and other superficial bodies of water, and 
sometimes by currents flowing into caves or smaller visible 
apertures.* Some of this humidity is exhaled again by the 

* The caves of Carniola receive considerable rivers from the surface of 
the earth, which cannot, in all cases, he identified with streams flowing out 
of them at other points, and like phenomena are not uncommon in other 
limestone countries. 

The cases are certainly not numerous where marine currents are known 
to pour continuously into cavities beneath the surface of the earth, but 
there is at least one well-authenticated instance of this sort—that of the 
mill streams at Argostoli in the island of Cephalonia. It had been long 
observed that the sea water flowed into several rifts and cavities in the 
limestone rocks of the coast, but the phenomenon has excited little atten¬ 
tion until very recently. In 1833,. three of the entrances were closed, and 
a regular channel, sixteen feet long and three feet wide, with a fall of three 
feet, was cut into the mouth of a larger cavity. The sea water flowed into 
this canal, and could be followed eighteen or twenty feet beyond its inner 
terminus, when it disappeared in holes and clefts in the rock. 

In 1858, the canal had been enlarged to the width of five feet and a 
half, and a depth of a foot. The water pours rapidly through the canal 
into an irregular depression and forms a pool, the surface of which is three 
or four feet below the adjacent soil, and about two and a half or three feet 
below the level of the sea. From this pool it escapes through several 
holes and clefts in the rock, and has not yet been found to emerge else¬ 
where. 

There is a tide at Argostoli of about six inches in still weather, but it is 
considerably higher with a south wind. I do not find it stated whether 
water flows through the canal into the cavity at low tide, but it distinctly 
appears that there is no refluent current, as of course there could not be 
from a basin so much below the sea. Mousson found the delivery through 
the canal to be at the rate of 24.88 cubic feet to the second; at what stage 
of the tide does not appear. Other mills of the same sort have been 


SUBTERRANEAN WATERS. 


435 


soil, some is taken up by organic growths and by inorganic 
compounds, some poured out upon the surface by springs and 
either immediately evaporated or carried down to larger 
streams and to the sea, some flows by subterranean courses 
into the bed of fresh-water rivers * or of the ocean, and some 
remains, though even here not in forever motionless repose, to 
fill deep cavities and underground channels.f In every case 

erected, and there appear to be several points on the coast where the sea 
flows into the land. 

Yarious hypotheses have been suggested to explain this phenomenon, 
some of which assume that the water descends to a great depth beneath 
the crust of the earth, but the supposition of a difference of level in the 
surface of the sea on the opposite sides of the island, which seems con¬ 
firmed by other circumstances, is the most obvious method of explaining 
these singular facts. If we suppose the level of the water on one side of 
the island to be raised by the action of currents three or four feet higher 
than on the other, the existence of cavities and channels in the rock would 
easily account for a subterranean current beneath the island, and the aper¬ 
tures of escape might be so deep or so small as to elude observation. See 
Am der Natur, vol. 19, pp. 129, et seqq. 

* “ The affluents received by the Seine below Rouen are so inconsider¬ 
able, that the augmentation of the volume of that river must be ascribed 
principally to springs rising in its bed. This is a point of which engineers 
now take notice, and M. Belgrand, the able officer charged with the im¬ 
provement of the navigation of the Seine between Paris and Rouen, has 
devoted much attention to it.”— Babinet, Etudes et Lectures , iii, p. 185. 

On page 282 of the volume just quoted, the same author observes : “ In 
the lower part of its course, from the falls of the Oise, the Seine receives 
so few important affluents, that evaporation alone would suffice to exhaust 
all the water which passes under the bridges of Paris.” 

This supposes a much greater amount of evaporation than has been 
usually computed, but I believe it is well settled that the Seine conveys to 
the sea much more water than is discharged into it by all its superficial 
branches. 

t Girard and Duchatelet maintain that the subterranean waters of 
Paris are absolutely stagnant. See their report on drainage by artesian 
wells, Annales des Pouts et Chaussees, 1833, 2me s6mestre, pp. 313, et seqq. 

This opinion, if locally true, cannot be generally so, for it is inconsistent 
with the well-known fact that the very first eruption of water from a boring 
often brings up leaves and other objects which must have been carried into 
the underground reservoirs by currents. 





436 


SUBTERRANEAN WATERS. 


the aqueous vapors of the air are the ultimate source of supply, 
and all these hidden stores are again returned to the atmo¬ 
sphere by evaporation. 

The proportion of the water of precipitation taken up by 
direct evaporation from the surface of the ground seems to 
have been generally exaggerated, sufficient allowance not 
being made for moisture carried downward, or in a lateral 
direction, by infiltration or by crevices in the superior rocky 
or earthy strata. 

According to Wittwer, Mariotte found that but one 
sixth of the precipitation in the basin of the Seine was 
delivered into the sea by that river, “ so that five sixths 
remained for evaporation and consumption by the organic 
world.” * 

Lieutenant Maury estimates the annual amount of pre¬ 
cipitation in the valley of the Mississippi at 620 cubic miles, 
the discharge of that river into the sea at 107 cubic miles, 
and concludes that “this would leave 513 cubic miles of 
water to be evaporated from this river basin annually.” t 

In these and other like computations, the water carried 
down into the earth by capillary and larger conduits is 
wholly lost sight of, and no thought is bestowed upon the 
supply for springs, for common and artesian wells, and 
for underground rivers, like those in the great caves of 
Kentucky, which may gush up in fresh-water currents at 
the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, or rise to the light of day 
in the far-off peninsula of Florida. 

The progress of the emphatically modern science of geology 
has corrected these erroneous views, because the observations 
on which it depends have demonstrated not only the existence, 
but the movement, of water in nearly all geological forma¬ 
tions, have collected evidence of the presence of large reser¬ 
voirs at greater or less depths beneath surfaces of almost every 

* PhysiJcalische Geographic, p. 286. It does not appear whether this 
inference is Mariotte’s or Wittwer’s. I suppose it is a conclusion of the 
latter. 

f Physical Geography of the Sea. Tenth edition. London, 1861, § 274. 


ABSORPTION BY THE EARTH. 


437 


character, and have investigated the rationale of the attendant 
phenomena. The distribution of these waters has been mi¬ 
nutely studied with reference to a great number of localities, 
and though the actual mode of their vertical and horizontal 
transmission is still involved in much doubt, the laws which 
determine their aggregation are so well understood, that, when 
the geology of a given district is known, it is not difficult to 
determine at what depth water will be reached by the borer, 
and to what height it will rise. 

The same principles have been successfully applied to the 
discovery of small subterranean collections or currents of water, 
and some persons have acquired, by a moderate knowledge of 
the superficial structure of the earth combined with long prac¬ 
tice, a skill in the selection of favorable places for digging 
wells which seems to common observers little less than mirac¬ 
ulous. The Abbe Paramelle—a French ecclesiastic who de¬ 
voted himself for some years to this subject and was extensively 
employed as a well-finder—states, in his work on Fountains, 
that in the course of thirty-four years he had pointed out more 
than ten thousand subterranean springs, and though his geo¬ 
logical speculations were often erroneous, the highest scientific 
authorities in Europe have testified to the great practical value 
of his methods, and the almost infallible certainty of his pre¬ 
dictions.* 

Babinet quotes a French proverb, “ Summer rain wets 
nothing,” and explains it as meaning that the water of such 
rains is “ almost totally taken up by evaporation.” “ The 
rains of summer,” he adds, “ however abundant they may be, 
do not penetrate the soil to a greater depth than 15 or 20 
centimetres. In summer the evaporating power of the heat is 
five or six times as great as in winter, and this power is 
exerted by an atmosphere capable of containing five times as 
much vapor as in winter.” “ A stratum of snow which pre¬ 
vents evaporation [from the soil] causes almost all the water 
that composes it to filter down into the earth, and form a 


* Paeamelle, Quellenhunde, mit einem Voncort von B. Cotta, 1856. 


438 


ABSORPTION AND INFILTRATION. 


reserve for springs, wells, and rivers which conld not be sup¬ 
plied by any amount of summer rain.” “ This latter—useful, 
indeed like dew, to vegetation—does not penetrate the soil 
and accumulate a store to feed springs and to he brought up 
by them to the open air.” * This conclusion, however applic¬ 
able it may be to the climate and soil of France, is too broadly 
stated to be accepted as a general truth, and in countries 
where the precipitation is small in the winter months, familiar 
observation shows that the quantity of water yielded by deep 
wells and natural springs depends not less on the rains of sum¬ 
mer than on those of the rest of the year, and, consequently, 
that much of the precipitation of that season must find its way 
to strata too deep to lose water by evaporation. 

The supply of subterranean reservoirs and currents, as well 
as of springs, is undoubtedly derived chiefly from infiltration, 
and hence it must be affected by all changes of the natural 
surface that accelerate or retard the drainage of the soil, or 
that either promote or obstruct evaporation from it. It has 
sufficiently appeared from what has gone before, that the spon¬ 
taneous drainage of cleared ground is more rapid than that of 
the forest, and consequently, that the felling of the woods, as 
well as the draining of swamps, deprives the subterranean 
waters of accessions which would otherwise be conveyed to 
them by infiltration. The same effect is produced by artificial 
contrivances for drying the soil either by open ditches or by 
underground pipes or channels, and in proportion as the sphere 
of these operations is extended, the effect of them cannot fail 
to make itself more and more sensibly felt in the diminished 
supply of water furnished by wells and running springs.f 

* Etudes et lectures , vi, p. 118. 

t “ The area of soil dried by draining is constantly increasing, and the 
water received by the surface from atmospheric precipitation is thereby 
partly conducted into new channels, and, in general, carried off more 
rapidly than before. "Will not this fact exert an influence on the condition 
of many springs, whose basin of supply thus undergoes a partial or com¬ 
plete transformation? I am convinced that it will, and it is important to 
collect data for solving the question.”— Beknhard Ootta, Preface to 
Paramelle, Quellenhunde (German translation), pp. vii, viii. 


DIFFUSION OF WATER IN THE SOIL. 


439 


It is undoubtedly true that loose soils, stripped of vegeta¬ 
tion and broken up by the plough or other processes of cul¬ 
tivation, may, until again carpeted by grasses or other plants, 
absorb more rain and snow water than when they were cov¬ 
ered by a natural growth ; but it is also true that the evapora¬ 
tion from such soils is augmented in a still greater proportion. 
Bain scarcely penetrates beneath the sod of grass ground, but 
runs off over the surface; and after the heaviest showers a 
ploughed field will often be dried by evaporation before the 
water can be carried off by infiltration, while the soil of a 
neighboring grove will remain half saturated for weeks to¬ 
gether. Sandy soils frequently rest on a tenacious subsoil, at 
a moderate depth, as is usually seen in the pine plains of the 
United States, where pools of rain water collect in slight de¬ 
pressions on the surface of earth, the upper stratum of which 
is as porous as a sponge. In the open grounds such pools are 
very soon dried up by the sun and wind ; in the woods they 
remain unevaporated long enough for the water to diffuse itself 
laterally until it finds, in the subsoil, crevices through which 
it may escape, or slopes which it may follow to their outcrop 
or descend along them to lower strata. 

The readiness with which water not obstructed by imper¬ 
meable strata diffuses itself through the earth in all directions 
-—and, consequently, the importance of keeping up the supply 
of subterranean reservoirs—find a familiar illustration in the 
effect of paving the ground about the stems of vines and trees. 
The surface earth around the trunk of a tree may be made per¬ 
fectly impervious to water, by flag stones and cement, for a 
distance greater than the spread of the roots ; and yet the tree 
will not suffer for want of moisture, except in droughts severe 
enough sensibly to affect the supply in deep wells and springs. 
Both forest and fruit trees grow well in cities where the streets 
and courts are closely paved, and where even the lateral access 
of water to the roots is more or less obstructed by deep cellars 
and foundation walls. The deep-lying veins and sheets of 
water, supplied by infiltration from above, send up moisture 
by capillary attraction, and the pavement prevents the soil 


440 


DIFFUSION OF WATER IN THE SOIL. 


beneath it from losing its humidity by evaporation. Hence, 
city-grown trees find moisture enough for their roots, and 
though plagued with smoke and dust, often retain their tresh- 
ness while those planted in the open fields, where sun and 
wind dry up the soil faster than the subterranean fountains 
can water it, are withering from drought. Without the help 
of artificial conduit or of water carrier, the Thames and the 
Seine refresh the ornamental trees that shade the thorough¬ 
fares of London and of Paris, and beneath the hot and reeking 
mould of Egypt, the Hile sends currents to the extremest bor¬ 
der of its valley.* 

* See the interesting observations of Kriegk on this subject, Schriften 
zur allgemeinen Erdkunde , cap. iii, § 6, and especially the passages in 
Ritter’s Erdkunde , vol. i, there referred to. 

Laurent, (Memoires sur le Sahara Oriental , pp. 8, 9), in speaking of a 
river at El-Faid, “which, like all those of the desert, is, most of the time, 
without water,” observes, that many wells are dug in the bed of the river 
in the dry season, and that the subterranean current thus reached appears 
to extend itself laterally, at about the same level, at least a kilometre from 
the river, as water is found by digging to the depth of twelve or fifteen 
metres at a village situated at that distance from the bank. 

The most remarkable case of infiltration known to me by personal 
observation is the occurrence of fresh water in the beach sand on the 
eastern side of the Gulf of Akaba, the eastern arm of the Red Sea. If you 
dig a cavity in the beach near the sea level, it soon fills with water so fresh 
as not to be undrinkable, though the sea water two or three yards from it 
contains even more than the average quantity of salt. It cannot be main¬ 
tained that this is sea water freshened by filtration through a few feet or 
inches of sand, for salt water cannot be deprived of its salt by that process. 
It can only come from the highlands of Arabia, and it would seem that 
there must exist some large reservoir in the interior to furnish a supply 
which, in spite of evaporation, holds out for months after the last rains of 
winter, and perhaps even through the year. I observed the fact in the 
month of June. 

The precipitation in the mountains that border the Red Sea is not 
known by pluviometric measurement, but the mass of debris brought 
down the ravines by the torrents proves that their volume must be large. 
The proportion of surface covered by sand and absorbent earth, in Arabia 
Petrsea and the neighboring countries, is small, and the mountains drain 
themselves rapidly into the wadies or ravines where the torrents are 
formed; but the beds of earth and disintegrated rock at the bottom of the 


ARTESIAN WELLS. 


441 


Artesian Wells. 

The existence of artesian wells depends upon that of sub¬ 
terranean reservoirs and rivers, and the supply yielded by 
borings is regulated by the abundance of such sources. The 
waters of the earth are, in many cases., derived from superficial 
currents which are seen to pour into chasms opened, as it were, 
expressly for their reception; and in others where no apertures 
in the crust of the earth have been detected, their existence is 
proved by the fact that artesian wells sometimes bring up 
from great depths seeds, leaves, and even living fish, which 
must have been carried down through channels large enough 
to admit a considerable stream. But in general, the sheets 
and currents of water reached by deep boring appear to be 
primarily due to infiltration from highlands where the water is 
first collected in superficial or subterranean reservoirs. By 
means of channels conforming to the dip of the strata, these 
reservoirs communicate with the lower basins, and exert upon 
them a fluid pressure sufficient to raise a column to the sur¬ 
face, whenever an orifice is opened.* The water delivered by 

valleys are of so loose and porous texture, that a great quantity of water 
is absorbed in saturating them before a visible current is formed on their 
surface. In a heavy thunder storm, accompanied by a deluging rain, 
which I witnessed at Mount Sinai in the month of May, a large stream of 
water poured, in an almost continuous cascade, down the steep ravine 
north of the convent, by which travellers sometimes descend from the 
plateau between the two peaks, but after reaching the foot of the moun¬ 
tain, it flowed but a few yards before it was swallowed up in the sands. 

* It is conceivable that in large and shallow subterranean basins the 
superincumbent earth may rest upon the water and be partly supported by 
it. In such case the weight of the earth would be an additional, if not the 
sole, cause of the ascent of the water through the tubes of artesian wells. 
The elasticity of gases in the cavities may also aid in forcing up water. 

A French engineer, M. Mullot, invented a simple method of bringing 
to the surface water from any one of several successive accumulations at 
different depths, or of raising it, unmixed, from two or more of them at 
once. It consists in employing concentric tubes, one within the other, 
leaving a space for the rise of water between them, and reaching each to 
the sheet from which it is intended to draw. 


442 


ARTESIAN WELLS IN THE DESERT. 


an artesian well is, therefore, often derived from distant 
sources, and may be wholly unaffected by geographical or 
meteorological changes in its immediate neighborhood, while 
the same changes may quite dry np common wells and springs 
which are fed only by the local infiltration of their own nar¬ 
row basins. 

In most cases, artesian wells have been bored for purely 
economical or industrial purposes, such as to obtain good water 
for domestic use or for driving light machinery, to reach saline 
or other mineral springs, and recently, in America, to open 
fountains of petroleum or rock oil. The geographical and geo¬ 
logical effects of such abstraction of fluids from the bowels of 
the earth are too remote and uncertain to be here noticed; * 
but artesian wells have lately been employed in Algeria for a 
purpose which has even now a substantial, and may hereafter 
acquire a very great geographical importance. It was ob¬ 
served by many earlier as well as recent travellers in the East, 
among whom Shaw deserves special mention, that the Libyan 
desert, bordering upon the cultivated shores of the Mediter¬ 
ranean, appeared in many places to rest upon a subterranean 
lake at an accessible distance below the surface. The Moors 
are vaguely said to have bored artesian wells down to this 
reservoir, to obtain water for domestic use and irrigation, but 

* Many more or less probable conjectures have been made on this sub¬ 
ject, but thus far I am not aware that any of the apprehended results have 
been actually shown to have happened. In an article in the Annales des 
Fonts et Ghaussees for July and August, 1839, p. 131, it was suggested that 
the sinking of the piers of a bridge at Tours in France was occasioned by 
the abstraction of water from the earth by artesian wells, and the conse¬ 
quent withdrawal of the mechanical support it had previously given to the 
strata containing it. A reply to this article will be found in Yiollet, 
Theorie des Puits Artesiens , p. 217. 

In some instances the water has rushed up with a force which seemed 
to threaten the inundation of the neighborhood, and even the washing 
away of much soil; but in these cases the partial exhaustion of the supply, 
or the relief of hydrostatic or elastic pressure, has generally produced a 
diminution of the flow in a short time, and I do not know that any serious 
evil has ever been occasioned in this way. 


ARTESIAN WELLS IN THE DESERT. 


443 


I do not find such wells described by any trustworthy travel¬ 
ler, and the universal astonishment and incredulity with 
which the native tribes viewed the operations of the French 
engineers sent into the desert for that purpose, are a sufficient 
proot that this mode of reaching the subterranean waters was 
new to them. They were, however, aware of the existence of 
water below the sands, and were dexterous in digging wells— 
square shafts lined with a framework of palm-tree stems—to 
the level of the sheet. The wells so constructed, though not 
technically artesian wells, answer the same purpose; for the 
water rises to the surface and flows over it as from a spring.* 

* See a very interesting account of these wells, and of the workmen 
who clean them out when obstructed by sand brought up with the water, 
in Laurent’s memoir on the artesian wells recently bored by the French 
Government in the Algerian desert, Mtmoire sur le Sahara Oriental , etc., 
pp. 19, et seqq. Some of the men remained under water from two minutes 
to two minutes and forty seconds. Several officers are quoted as having 
observed immersions of three minutes’ duration, and M. Berbrugger alleges 
that he witnessed one of five minutes and fifty-five seconds. The shortest 
of these periods is longer than the best pearl diver can remain below the 
surface of salt water. The wells of the Sahara are from twenty to eighty 
metres deep. 

It has often been asserted that the ancient Egyptians were acquainted 
with the art of boring artesian wells. Parthey, describing the Little Oasis, 
mentions ruins of a Eoman aqueduct, and observes : “ It appears from the 
recent researches of Aim, a French engineer, that these aqueducts are con¬ 
nected with old artesian wells, the restoration of which would render it 
practicable to extend cultivation much beyond its present limits. This 
agrees with ancient testimony. It is asserted that the inhabitants of the 
oases sunk wells to the depth of 200, 300, and even 500 ells, from which 
affluent streams of water poured out. See Olympiodokus in Photii Bibl 
cod. 80, p. 61, 1. 17, ed. Bekk.”— Pakthey, Wanderungen, ii, p. 528. 

In a paper entitled, Note relative d Vexecution Pun Puits Artesien en 
Egypte sous la XVIII dynastie , presented to the Academic des Inscrip¬ 
tions et Belles Lettres, on the 12th of November, 1852, M. Lenormant en¬ 
deavors to show that a hieroglyphic inscription found at Oontrapscelcis 
proves the execution of a work of this sort in the Nubian desert, at the 
period indicated in the title to his paper. The interpretation of the in¬ 
scription is a question for Egyptologists ; but if wells were actually bored 
through the rock by the Egyptians after the Chinese or the European 
fashion, it is singular that among the numerous and minute represents- 


444 


ARTESIAN WELLS IN TEE DESERT. 


These wells, however, are too few and too scanty in supply 
to serve any other purposes than the domestic wells of other 
countries, and it is blit recently that the transformation of 
desert into cultivable land by this means has been seriously 
attempted. The French Government has bored a large num¬ 
ber of artesian wells in the Algerian desert within a few years, 
and the native sheikhs are beginning to avail themselves of 
the process. Every well becomes the nucleus of a settlement 
proportioned to the supply of water, and before the end of the 
year 1860, several nomade tribes had abandoned their wan¬ 
dering life, established themselves around the wells, and 
planted more than 30,000 palm trees, besides other perennial 
vegetables.* The water is found at a small depth, generally 
from 100 to 200 feet, and though containing too large a pro- 

tions of their industrial operations, painted or carved on the walls of 
their tombs, no trace of the processes employed for so remarkable and im¬ 
portant a purpose should have been discovered. 

It is certain that artesian wells have been common in China from a 
very remote antiquity, and the simple method used by the Chinese—where 
the borer is raised and let fall by a rope, instead of a rigid rod—has been 
lately been employed in Europe with advantage. Some of the Chinese 
wells are said to he 3,000 feet deep ; that of Neusalzwerk in Silesia—the 
deepest in Europe—is 2,300. A well was bored at St. Louis, in Missouri, 
a few years ago, to supply a sugar refinery, to the depth of 2,199 feet. 
This was executed by a private firm in three years, at the expense of only 
$10,000. Another has since been bored at the State capitol at Columbus, 
Ohio, 2,500 feet deep, but without obtaining the desired supply of water. 

* “ In the anticipation of our success at Oum-Thiour, every thing had 
been prepared to take advantage of this new source of wealth without a 
moment’s delay. A division of the tribe of the Selmia, and their sheikh, 
A'issa ben Sha, laid the foundation of a village as soon as the water flowed, 
and planted twelve hundred date palms, renouncing their wandering life to 
attach themselves to the soil. In this arid spot, life had taken the place 
of solitude, and presented itself, with its smiling images, to the astonished 
traveller. Young girls were drawing water at the fountain; the flocks, tho 
great dromedaries with their slow pace, the horses led by the halter, were 
moving to the watering trough ; the hounds and the falcons enlivened the 
group of party-colored tents, and living voices and animated movement 
had succeeded to silence and desolation.” —Laurent, Memoircs sur le Sa¬ 
hara, p. 85. 


ARTESIAN WELLS IN THE DESERT. 


445 


portion of mineral matter to be acceptable to a European palate, 
it answers well for irrigation, and does not prove unwholesome 
to the natives. 

The most obvious use of artesian wells in the desert at 
present is that of creating stations for the establishment of mil¬ 
itary posts and halting places for the desert traveller ; but if 
the supply of water shall prove adequate for the indefinite 
extension of the system, it is probably destined to produce a 
greater geographical transformation than has ever been effected 
by any scheme of human improvement. The most striking 
contrast of landscape scenery that nature brings near together 
in time or place, is that between the greenery of the tropics, 
or of a northern summer, and the snowy pall of leafless winter. 
Next to this in startling novelty of effect, we must rank the 
sudden transition from the shady and verdant oasis of the 
desert to the bare and burning party-colored ocean of sand and 
rock which surrounds it.* The most sanguine believer in 

* The variety of hues and tones in the local color of the desert is, I 
think, one of the phenomena which most surprise and interest a stranger 
to those regions. In England and the United States, rock is so generally 
covered with moss or earth, and earth with vegetation, that untravelled 
Englishmen and Americans are not very familiar with naked rock as a con¬ 
spicuous element of landscape. Hence, in their conception of a bare cliff 
or precipice, they hardly ascribe definite color to it, but depict it to their 
imagination as wearing a neutral tint not assimilable to any of the hues 
with which nature tinges her atmospheric or paints her organic creations. 
There are certainly extensive desert ranges, chiefly limestone formations, 
where the surface is either white, or has weathered down to a dull uni¬ 
formity of tone which can hardly be called color at all; and there are 
sand plains and drifting hills of wearisome monotony of tint. But the 
chemistry of the air, though it may tame the glitter of the limestone to a 
dusky gray, brings out the green and brown and purple of the igneous 
rocks, and the white and red and blue and vioiet and yellow of the sand¬ 
stone. Many a cliff in Arabia Petrsea is as manifold in color as the rain¬ 
bow, and the veins are so variable in thickness and inclination, so contorted 
and involved in arrangement, as to bewilder the eye of the spectator like a 
disk of party-colored glass in rapid revolution. 

In the narrower wadies, the mirage is not common ; but on broad ex¬ 
panses, as at many points between Cairo and Suez, and in Wadi el Araba, 
it mocks you with lakes and land-locked bays, studded with islands and 


446 


ARTIFICIAL SPRINGS. 


indefinite human progress hardly expects that man’s cunning 
will accomplish the universal fulfilment of the prophecy, u the 
desert shall blossom as the rose,” in its literal sense; but sober 
geographers have thought the future conversion of the sand 
plains of Northern Africa into fruitful gardens, by means of 
artesian wells, not an improbable expectation. They have 
gone farther, and argued that, if the soil were covered with 
fields and forests, vegetation would call down moisture from 
the Libyan sky, and that the showers which are now wasted 
on the sea, or so often deluge Southern Europe with destruc¬ 
tive inundation, would in part be condensed over the arid 
wastes of Africa, and thus, without further aid from man, 
bestow abundance on regions which nature seems to have con¬ 
demned to perpetual desolation. 

An equally bold speculation, founded on the well-known 
fact, that the temperature of the earth and of its internal waters 
increases as we descend beneath the surface, has suggested that 
artesian wells might supply heat for industrial and domestic 
purposes, for hot-house cultivation, and even for the local 
amelioration of climate. The success with which Count Lar- 
darello has employed natural hot springs for the evaporation 
of water charged with boracic acid, and other fortunate appli¬ 
cations of the heat of thermal sources, lend some countenance 
to the latter project; but both must, for the present, be ranked 
among the vague possibilities of science, not regarded as prob¬ 
able future triumphs of man over nature. 

Artificial Springs. 

A more plausible and inviting scheme is that of the crea¬ 
tion of perennial springs by husbanding rain and snow water, 

fringed with trees, all painted with an illusory truth of representation 
absolutely indistinguishable from the reality. The checkered earth, too, is 
canopied with a heaven as variegated as itself. You see, high up in the 
sky, rosy clouds at noonday, colored probably by reflection from the ruddy 
mountains, while near the horizon float cumuli of a transparent ethereal 
blue, seemingly balled up out of the clear cerulean substance of the firma¬ 
ment, and detached from the heavenly vault, not by color or consistence, 
but solely by the light and shade of their prominences. 


palissy'b theory of springs. 


447 


storing it up in artificial reservoirs of earth, and filtering it 
through purifying strata, in analogy with the operations of 
nature. The sagacious Palissy—starting from the theory that 
all springs are primarily derived from precipitation, and rea¬ 
soning justly on the accumulation and movement of water in 
the earth—proposed to reduce theory to practice, and to im¬ 
itate the natural processes by which rain is absorbed by the 
earth and given out again in running fountains. “ When I 
had long and diligently considered the cause of the springing 
of natural fountains and the places where they be wont to 
issue,” says he, “ I did plainly perceive, at last, that they do 
proceed and are engendered of nought but the rains. And it 
is this, look you, which hath moved me to enterprise the gath¬ 
ering together of rain water after the manner of nature, and 
the most closely according to her fashion that I am able ; and 
I am well assured that by following the formulary of the 
Supreme Contriver of fountains, I can make springs, the water 
whereof shall be as good and pure and clear as of such which 
be natural.” * Palissy discusses the subject of the origin 
of springs at length and with much ability, dwelling specially 
on infiltration, and, among other things, thus explains the fre¬ 
quency of springs in mountainous regions: u Having well 
considered the which, thou mayest plainly see the reason why 
there be more springs and rivulets proceeding from the moun¬ 
tains than from the rest of the earth ; which is for no other 
cause but that the rocks and mountains do retain the water of 
the rains like vessels of brass. And the said waters falling 
upon the said mountains descend continually through the earth, 
and through crevices, and stop not till they find some place 
that is bottomed with stone or close and thick rocks ; and they 
rest upon such bottom until they find some channel or other 
manner of issue, and then they flow out in springs or brooks 
or rivers, according to the greatness of the reservoirs and of 
the outlets thereof.” f 

After a full exposition of his theory, Palissy proceeds to 
* CEuvres de Palissy, Des Eaux et Fontaines, p. 157. t Id., p. 166. 


448 


ARTIFICIAL SPRINGS. 


describe liis method of creating springs, which is substantially 
the same as that lately proposed by Babinet in the following 
terms: “ Choose a piece of ground containing four or five 
acres, with a sandy soil, and with a gentle slope to determine 
the flow of the water. Along its upper line, dig a trench five 
or six feet deep and six feet wide. Level the bottom of the 
trench, and make it impermeable by paving, by macadamizing, 
by bitumen, or, more simply and cheaply, by a layer of clay. 
By the side of this trench dig another, and throw the earth 
from it into the first, and so on until you have rendered the 
subsoil of the whole parcel impermeable to rain water. Build 
a wall along the lower line with an aperture in the middle for 
the water, and plant fruit or other low trees upon the whole, 
to shade the ground and check the currents of air which pro¬ 
mote evaporation. This will infallibly give you a good spring 
which will flow without intermission and supply the wants of 
a whole hamlet or a large chateau.” * Babinet states that the 
whole amount of precipitation on a reservoir of the proposed 
area, in the climate of Paris, would be about 13,000 cubic 
yards, not above one half of which, he thinks, would be lost, 
and, of course, the other half would remain available to supply 
the spring. I much doubt whether this expectation would be 
realized in practice, in its whole extent; for if Babinet is right 
in supposing that the summer rain is wholly evaporated, the 
winter rains, being much less in quantity, would hardly suffice 
to keep the earth saturated and give off so large a surplus. 

The method of Palissy, though, as I have said, similar in 
principle to that of Babinet, would be cheaper of execution, 

* Babinet, Etudes et Lectures sur les Sciences d’’ Observation , ii, p. 225. 
Our author precedes his account of his method with a complaint which 
most men who indulge in thinking have occasion to repeat many times in 
the course of their lives. “ I will explain to my readers the construction 
of artificial fountains according to the plan of the famous Bernard de Pa¬ 
lissy, who, a hundred and fifty [three hundred] years ago, came and took 
away from me, a humble academician of the nineteenth century, this dis¬ 
covery which I had taken a great deal of pains to make. It is enough to 
discourage all invention when one finds plagiarists in the past as well as in 
the future! ” (P. 224.) 


ECONOMIZING PRECIPITATION. 


449 


and, at the same time, more efficient. He proposes the con¬ 
struction of relatively small filtering receptacles, into which he 
would conduct the rain falling upon a large area of rocky 
hillside, or other sloping ground, not readily absorbing water. 
This process would, in all probability, be a very successful, as 
well as an inexpensive, mode of economizing atmospheric pre¬ 
cipitation, and compelling the rain and snow to form perennial 
fountains at will. 


Economizing Precipitation. 

The methods suggested by Palissy and by Babinet are of 
limited application, and designed only to supply a sufficient 
quantity of water for the domestic use of small villages or large 
private establishments. Dumas has proposed a much more 
extensive system for collecting and retaining the whole precip¬ 
itation in considerable valleys, and storing it in reservoirs, 
whence it is to be drawn for household and mechanical pur¬ 
poses, for irrigation, and, in short, for all the uses to which the 
water of natural springs and brooks is applicable. His plan 
consists in draining both surface and subsoil, by means of con¬ 
duits differing in construction according to local circumstances, 
but in the main not unlike those employed in improved agri¬ 
culture, collecting the water in a central channel, seeming its 
proper filterage, checking its too rapid flow by barriers at con¬ 
venient points, and finally receiving the whole in spacious 
covered reservoirs, from which it may be discharged in a con¬ 
stant flow or at intervals as convenience may dictate.* 

There is no reasonable doubt that a very wide employment 
of these various contrivances for economizing and supplying 
water is practicable, and the expediency of resorting to them 
is almost purely an economical question. There appears to be 
no serious reason to apprehend collateral evils from them, and 
in fact all of them, except artesian wells, are simply indirect 
methods of returning to the original arrangements of nature, 
or, in other words, of restoring the fluid circulation of the 

* M. G. Dumas, La Science des Fontaines , 1857. 

29 


450 


ECONOMIZING PRECIPITATION. 


0 


globe; for when the earth was covered with the forest, peren¬ 
nial springs gushed from the foot of every hill, brooks flowed 
down the bed of every valley. The partial recovery of the 
fountains and rivulets which once abundantly watered the face 
of the agricultural world seems practicable by such means, 
even without any general replanting of the forests ; and the 
cost of one year’s warfare, if judiciously expended in a com¬ 
bination of both methods of improvement, would secure, to 
almost every country that man has exhausted, an amelioration 
of climate, a renovated fertility of soil, and a general physical 
improvement, which might almost be characterized as a new 
creation. 


CHAPTER V 


THE SANDS. 


ORIGIN OF SAND—SAND NOW CARRIED DOWN TO THE SEA—THE SANDS OF 

EGYPT AND THE ADJACENT DESERT-THE SUEZ CANAL-THE SANDS OF EGYPT 

-COAST DUNES AND SAND PLAINS—SAND BANKS—DUNES ON COAST OF AMER¬ 
ICA—DUNES OF WESTERN EUROPE—FORMATION OF DUNES-CHARACTER OF 

DUNE SAND-INTERIOR STRUCTURE OF DUNES-FORM OF DUNES-GEO¬ 

LOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF DUNES—INLAND DUNES—AGE, CHARACTER, AND 

PERMANENCE OF DUNES-USE OF DUNES AS BARRIER AGAINST THE SEA— 

ENCROACHMENTS OF THE SEA—THE LIIMFJORD—ENCROACHMENTS OF THE SEA— 
DRIFTING OF DUNE SANDS—DUNES OF GASCONY—DUNES OF DENMARK—DUNES 

OF PRUSSIA-ARTIFICIAL FORMATION OF DUNES-TREES SUITABLE FOR DUNE 

PLANTATIONS—EXTENT OF DUNES IN EUROPE—DUNE VINEYARDS OF CAPE 
BRETON—REMOVAL OF DUNES-INLAND SAND PLAINS—THE LANDES OF GAS¬ 
CONY-THE BELGIAN CAMPINE—SANDS AND STEPPES OF EASTERN EUROPE— 

ADVANTAGES OF RECLAIMING DUNES—GOVERNMENT WORKS OF IMPROVEMENT. 


Origin of Sand. 

Sand, which is found in beds or strata at the bottom of the 
sea or in the channels of rivers, as well as in extensive de¬ 
posits upon or beneath the surface of the dry land, appears to 
consist essentially of the detritus of rocks. It is not always by 
any means clear through what agency the solid rock has been 
reduced to a granular condition; for there are beds of quart- 
zose sand, where the sharp, angular shape of the particles ren¬ 
ders it highly improbable that they have been formed by 
gradual abrasion and attrition, and where the supposition of a 
crushing mechanical force seems equally inadmissible. In 
common sand, the quartz grains are the most numerous; but 
this is not a proof that the rocks from which these particles 


452 


ORIGIN OF SAND. 


were derived were wholly, or even chiefly, quartzose in char¬ 
acter ; for, in many composite rocks, as, for example, in the 
granitic group, the mica, felspar, and hornblende are more 
easily decomposed by chemical action, or disintegrated, com¬ 
minuted, and reduced to an impalpable state by mechanical 
force, than the quartz. In the destruction of such rocks, there¬ 
fore, the quartz would survive the other ingredients, and 
remain unmixed, when they had been decomposed and had 
entered into new chemical combinations, or been ground to 
slime and washed away by water currents. 

The greater or less specific gravity of the different constit¬ 
uents of rock doubtless aids in separating them into distinct 
masses when once disintegrated, though there are veined and 
stratified beds of sand where the difference between the upper 
and lower layers, in this respect, is too slight to be supposed 
capable of effecting a complete separation.* In cases where 
rock has been reduced to sandy fragments by heat, or by 
obscure chemical and other molecular forces, the sandbeds 
may remain undisturbed, and represent, in the series of geo¬ 
logical strata, the solid formations from which they were 
derived. The large masses of sand not found in place have 
been transported and accumulated by w r ater or by wind, the 
former being generally considered the most important of these 
agencies; for the extensive deposits of the Sahara, of the des¬ 
erts of Persia, and of that of Gobi, are commonly supposed to 
have been swept together or distributed by marine currents, 
and to have been elevated above the ocean by the same means 
as other upheaved strata. 

* In the curiously variegated sandstone of Arabia PetraBa—which is 
certainly a reaggregation of loose sand derived from particles of older 
rocks—the contiguous veins frequently differ very widely in color, but not 
sensibly in specific gravity or in texture; and the singular way in which 
they are now alternated, now confusedly intermixed, must be explained 
otherwise than by the weight of the respective grains which compose 
them. They seem, in fact, to have been let fail by water in violent ebul¬ 
lition or tumultuous mechanical agitation, or by a succession of sudden 
aquatic or aerial currents flowing in different directions and charged with 
differently colored matter. 


ACTION OF RIVERS. 


453 


Meteoric and mechanical influences are still active in the 
reduction of rocks to a fragmentary state; but the quantity of 
sand now transported to the sea seems to be comparatively 
inconsiderable, because—not to speak of the absence of diluvial 
action—the number of torrents emptying directly into the sea 
is much less than it was at earlier periods. The formation of 
alluvial plains in maritime bays, by the sedimentary matter 
brought down from the mountains, has lengthened the flow of 
such streams and converted them very generally into rivers, 
or rather affluents of rivers, much younger than themselves. 
The filling up of the estuaries has so reduced the slope of all 
large and many small rivers, and, consequently, so checked the 
current of what the Germans call their JJnterlauf ,, or lower 
course, that they are much less able to transport heavy ma¬ 
terial than at earlier epochs. The slime deposited by rivers at 
their junction with the sea, is usually found to be composed 
of material too finely ground and too light to be denominated 
sand, and it can be abundantly shown that the sandbanks at 
the outlet of large streams are of tidal, not of fluviatile origin, 
or, in lakes and tideless seas, a result of the concurrent action 
of waves and of wind. 

Large deposits of sand, therefore, must in general be con¬ 
sidered as of ancient, not of recent formation, and many emi¬ 
nent geologists ascribe them to diluvial action. Staring has 
discussed this question very fully, with special reference to the 
sands of the North Sea, the Zuiderzee, and the bays and chan¬ 
nels of the Dutch coast.* His general conclusion is, that the 

* De Bodem van Nederland , i, pp. 243, 246—377, et seqq. See also the 
arguments of Br6montier as to the origin of the dune sands of Gascony, 
Annates des Ponts et Chaussees , 1833, ler semestre, pp. 158, 161. Br6- 
montier estimates the sand annually thrown up on that coast at five cubic 
toises and two feet to the running toise (ubi supra, p. 162), or rather more 
than two hundred and twenty cubic feet to the running foot. Laval, upon 
observations continued through seven years, found the quantity to be 
twenty-five metres per running metre, which is equal to two hundred and 
sixty-eight cubic feet to the running foot.— Annates des Ponts et Chaussees , 
1842, 2me s6mestre, p. 229. These computations make the proportion of 
sand deposited on the coast of Gascony three or four times as great as that 


454 SAND CARRIED DOWN TO THE SEA. 

rivers of the Netherlands u move sand only hy a very slow dis¬ 
placement of sandbanks, and do not carry it with them as a 
suspended or floating material.” The sands of the German 
Ocean he holds to be a product of the “ great North German 
drift,” deposited where they now lie before the commencement 
of the present geological period, and he maintains similar 
opinions with regard to the sands thrown up by the Mediter¬ 
ranean at the mouths of the Nile and on the Barbary coast.* 

Sand now carried to the Sea. 

There are, however, cases where mountain streams still 
bear to the sea perhaps relatively small, but certainly abso¬ 
lutely large, amounts of disintegrated rock.f The quantity of 

observed by Andresen on the shores of Jutland. Laval estimates the total 
quantity of sand annually thrown up on the coast of Gascony at 6,000,000 
cubic metres, or more than 7,800,000 cubic yards. 

* De Bodem van Nederland , i, p. 339. 

t The conditions favorable to the production of sand from disintegrated 
rock, by causes now in action, are perhaps nowhere more perfectly realized 
than in the Sinaitic Peninsula. The mountains are steep and lofty, unpro¬ 
tected by vegetation or even by a coating of earth, and the rocks which 
compose them are in a shattered and fragmentary condition. They are 
furrowed by deep and precipitous ravines, with beds sufficiently inclined 
for the rapid flow of water, and generally without basins in which the 
larger blocks of stone rolled by the torrents can be dropped and left in 
repose ; there are severe frosts and much snow on the higher summits and 
ridges, and the winter rains are abundant and heavy. The mountains are 
principally of igneous formation, but many of the less elevated peaks are 
capped with sandstone, and on the eastern slope of the peninsula you may 
sometimes see, at a single glance, several lofty pyramids of granite, sepa¬ 
rated by considerable intervals, and all surmounted by horizontally strat¬ 
ified deposits of sandstone often only a few yards square, which correspond 
to each other in height, are evidently contemporaneous in origin, and were 
once connected in continuous beds. The degradation of the rock on which 
this formation rests is constantly bringing down masses of it, and mingling 
them with the basaltic, porphyritic, granitic, and calcareous fragments 
which the torrents carry down to the valleys, and, through them, in a 
state of greater or less disintegration, to the sea. The quantity of sand 
annually washed into the Eed Sea by the larger torrents of the Lesser 
Peninsula, is probably at least equal to that contributed to the ocean by 


SAND IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 


455 


sand and gravel carried into tlie Mediterranean by the torrents 
of the Maritime Alps, the Ligurian Apennines, the islands of 
Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily, and the mountans of Calabria, is 
apparently great. In mere mass, it is possible, if not probable, 
that as much rocky material, more or less comminuted, is con¬ 
tributed to the basin of the Mediterranean by Europe, even 
excluding the shores of the Adriatic and the Euxine, as is 
washed up from it upon the coasts of Africa and Syria. A 
great part of this material is thrown out again by the waves 
on the European shores of that sea. The harbors of Luni, Al- 
benga, San Kemo, and Savona west of Genoa, and of Porto 
Fino on the other side, are filling up, and the coast near Car¬ 
rara and Massa is said to have advanced upon the sea to a dis- 

any streams draining basins of no greater extent. Absolutely considered, 
then, the mass may be said to be large, but it is apparently very small as 
compared with the sand thrown up by the German Ocean and the Atlantic 
on the coasts of Denmark and of France. There are, indeed, in Arabia 
Petrsea, many torrents with very short courses, for the sea waves in many 
parts of the peninsular coast wash the base of the mountains. In these 
cases, the debris of the rocks do not reach the sea in a sufficiently com¬ 
minuted condition to be entitled to the appellation of sand, or even in the 
form of well-rounded pebbles. The fragments retain their angular shape, 
and, at some points on the coast, they become cemented together by lime 
or other binding substances held in solution or mechanical suspension in 
the sea water, and are so rapidly converted into a singularly heterogeneous 
conglomerate, that one deposit seems to be consolidated into a breccia 
before the next winter’s torrents cover it with another. 

In the northern part of the peninsula there are extensive deposits of 
sand intermingled with agate pebbles and petrified wood, but these are 
evidently neither derived from the Sinaitic group, nor products of local 
causes known to be now in action. 

I may here notice the often repeated but mistaken assertion, that the 
petrified wood of the "Western Arabian desert consists wholly of the stems 
of palms, or at least of endogenous vegetables. This is an error. I have 
myself picked up in that desert, within the space of a very few square 
yards, fragments both of fossil palms, and of at least two petrified trees 
distinctly marked as of exogenous growth both by annular structure and 
by knots. In ligneous character, one of these almost precisely resembles 
the grain of the extant beech, and this specimen was wormeaten before it 
was converted into silex. 


456 


SAND IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 


tance of 475 feet in thirty-three years.* Besides this, we have no 
evidence of the existence of deep-water currents in the Medi¬ 
terranean, extensive enough and strong enough to transport 
quartzose sand across the sea. It may be added that much of 
the rock from which the torrent sands of Southern Europe are 
derived contains little quartz, and hence the general character 
of these sands is such that they must be decomposed or ground 
down to an impalpable slime, long before they could be swept 
over to the African shore. 

The torrents of Europe, then, do not at present furnish the 
material which composes the beach sands of Northern Africa, 
and it is equally certain that those sands are not brought down 
by the rivers of the latter continent. They belong to a remote 
geological period, and have been accumulated by causes which 
we cannot at present assign. The wind does not stir water to 
great depths with sufficient force to disturb the bottom,f and 

* Bottgek, Das Hittelmeer, p. 128. 

t The testimony of divers and of other observers on this point is con¬ 
flicting, as might he expected from the infinite variety of conditions by 
which the movement of water is affected. It is generally believed that 
the action of the wind upon the water is not perceptible at greater depths 
than from fifteen feet in ordinary, to eighty or ninety in extreme cases; 
but these estimates are probably very considerably below the truth. An- 
dresen quotes Bremontier as stating that the movement of the waves some¬ 
times extends to the depth of five hundred feet, and he adds that others 
think it may reach to six or even seven hundred feet below the surface.— 
Andresen, Om Klitformationen, p. 20. 

Many physicists now suppose that the undulations of great bodies of 
water reach even deeper. But a movement of undulation is not neces¬ 
sarily a movement of translation, and besides, there is very frequently an 
undertow, which tends to carry suspended bodies out to sea as powerfully 
as the superficial waves to throw them on shore. Sandbanks sometimes 
recede from the coast, instead of rolling toward it. Beclus informs us 
that the Mauvaise, a sandbank near the Point de Grave, on the Atlantic 
coast of France, has moved five miles to the west in less than a century.— 
jRevue des Deux Mondes , for December, 1862, p. 905. 

The action of currents may, in some cases, have been confounded with 
that of the waves. Sea currents, strong enough, possibly, to transport 
6and for some distance, flow far below the surface in parts of the open 
ocean, and in narrow straits they have great force and velocity. The 


DESERT SANDS. 


457 


the sand thrown upon the coast in question must be derived 
from a narrow belt of sea. It must hence, in time, become 
exhausted, and the formation of new sandbanks and dunes 
upon the southern shores of the Mediterranean will cease at 
last for want of material.* 

But even in the cases where the accumulations of sand in 
extensive deserts appear to be of marine formation, or rather 
aggregation, and to have been brought to their present posi¬ 
tion by upheaval, they are not wholly composed of material 
collected or distributed by the currents of the sea; for, in all 
such regions, they continue to receive some small contributions 
from the disintegration of the rocks which underlie, or crop 
out through, the superficial deposits. In some instances, too, 
as in Northern Africa, additions are constantly made to the 
mass by the prevalence of sea winds, which transport, or, to 

divers employed at Constantinople in 1853 found in the Bosphorus, at the 
depth of twenty-five fathoms and at a point much exposed to the wash 
from Galata and Pera, a number of bronze guns supposed to have belonged 
to a ship of war blown up about a hundred and fifty years before. These 
guns were not covered by sand or slime though a crust of earthy matter, 
an inch in thickness, adhered to their upper surfaces, and the bottom of the 
strait appeared to be wholly free from sediment. The current was so pow¬ 
erful at this depth that the divers were hardly able to stand, and a keg of 
nails, purposely dropped into the water, in order that its movements might 
serve as a guide in the search for a bag of coin accidentally lost overboard 
from a ship in the harbor, was rolled by the stream several hundred yards 
before it stopped. 

* Few seas have thrown up so much sand as the shallow German 
Ocean ; but there is some reason to think that the amount of this material 
now cast upon its northern shores is less than at some former periods, 
though no extensive series of observations on this subject has been re¬ 
corded. On the Spit of Agger, at the present outlet of the Liimfjord, 
Andresen found the quantity during ten years, on a beach about five hun¬ 
dred and seventy feet broad, equal to an annual deposit of an inch and a 
half over the whole surface .—Ora Klitfonnationen , p. 56. 

This gives seventy-one and a quarter cubic feet to the running foot—a 
quantity certainly much smaller than that cast up by the same sea on the 
shores of the Dano-German duchies and of Holland, and, as we have 
seen, scarcely one fourth of that deposited by the Atlantic on the coast of 
Gascony. See ante . p. 6, note. 


458 


SANDS OF EGYPT. 


speak more precisely, roll the finer beach sand to considerable 
distances into the interior. But this is a very slow process, and 
the exaggerations of travellers have diffused a vast deal of 
popular error on the subject. 

Sands of Egypt. 

In the narrow valley of the Nile—which, above its bifur¬ 
cation near Cairo, is, throughout Egypt and Nubia, generally 
bounded by precipitous cliffs—wherever a ravine or other con¬ 
siderable depression occurs in the wall of rock, one sees what 
seems a stream of desert sand pouring down, and common 
observers have hence concluded that the whole valley is in 
danger of being buried under a stratum of infertile soil. The 
ancient Egyptians apprehended this, and erected walls, often 
of unburnt brick, across the outlet of gorges and lateral val¬ 
leys, to check the flow of the sand streams. In later ages, 
these walls have mostly fallen into decay, and no preventive 
measures against such encroachments are now resorted to. But 
the extent of the mischief to the soil of Egypt, and the future 
danger from this source, have been much overrated. The sand 
on the borders of the Nile is neither elevated so high by the 
wind, nor transported by that agency in so great masses, as is 
popularly supposed; and of that which is actually lifted or 
rolled and finally deposited by air currents, a considerable 
proportion is either calcareous, and, therefore, readily decom¬ 
posable, or in the state of a very fine dust, and so, in neither 
case, injurious to the soil. There are, indeed, both in Africa and 
in Arabia, considerable tracts of fine silicious sand, which may 
be carried far by high winds, but these are exceptional cases, 
and in general the progress of the desert sand is by a rolling 
motion along the surface.* So little is it lifted, and so incon- 

* Sand heaps, three and even six hundred feet high, are indeed formed 
by the wind, but this is effected by driving the particles up an inclined 
plane, not by lifting them. Bremontier, speaking of the sand hills on the 
western coast of France, says: “The particles of sand composing them 
are not large enough to resist wind of a certain force, nor small enough to 


SANDS OF EGYPT. 


459 


siderable is the quantity yet remaining on the borders of 
Egypt, that a wall four or five feet high suffices for centuries 
to check its encroachments. This is obvious to the eye of 
every observer who prefers the true to the marvellous; but 
the old-world fable of the overwhelming of caravans by the 
fearful simoom—which even the Arabs no longer repeat, if 
indeed they are the authors of it—is so thoroughly rooted in 
the imagination of Christendom that most desert travellers, of 
the tourist class, think they shall disappoint the readers of 
their journals if they do not recount the particulars of their 
escape from being buried alive by a sand storm, and the pop¬ 
ular demand for a “ sensation 55 must be gratified accordingly.* 

be taken up by it, like dust; they only roll along the surface from which 
they are detached, and, though moving with great velocity, they rarely 
rise to a greater height than three or four inches .”—Memoire sur les Dunes , 
Annales des Fonts et Ghaussees , 1833, ler s6mestre, p. 148. 

Andresen says that a wind, having a velocity of forty feet per second, 
is strong enough to raise particles of sand as high as the face and eyes of a 
man, but that, in general, it rolls along the ground, and is scarcely ever 
thrown more than to the height of a couple of yards from the surface. 
Even in these cases, it is carried forward by a hopping, not a continuous, 
motion; for a very narrow sheet or channel of water stops the drift en¬ 
tirely, all the sand dropping into it until it is filled up. 

The character of the motion of sand drifts is well illustrated by an in¬ 
teresting fact not much noticed hitherto by travellers in the East. In 
situations where the sand is driven through depressions in rock beds, or 
over deposits of silicious pebbles, the surface of the stone is worn and 
smoothed much more effectually than it could be by running water, and 
you may pick up, in such localities, rounded, irregularly broken fragments 
of agate, which have received from the attrition of the sand as fine a polish 
as could be given them by the wheel of the lapidary. 

Very interesting observations on the polishing of hard stones by drift¬ 
ing sand will be found in the Geological Report of William P. Blake : Pa¬ 
cific Railroad Report , vol. v, pp. 92, 230, 231. The same geologist observes, 
p. 242, that the sand of the Colorado desert does not rise high in the air, 
but bounds along on the surface or only a few inches above it. 

* Wilkinson says that, in much experience in the most sandy parts of 
the Libyan desert, and much inquiry of the best native sources, he never 
saw or heard of any instance of danger to man or beast from the mere 
accumulation of sand transported by the wind. Chesney’s observations in 


460 


THE SUEZ CANAL. 

Another circumstance is necessary to be considered in esti¬ 
mating the danger to which the arable lands ot Egypt are 
exposed. The prevailing wind in the valley of the JNile and 
its borders is from the north, and it may be said without 
exaggeration that the north wind blows tor three quarters ot 
the year.* The effect of winds blowing up the valley is to 
drive the sands of the desert plateau which border it, in a 
direction parallel with the axis of the valley, not transversely 
to it; and if it ran in a straight line, the north wind would 
carrv no desert sand into it. There are, however, both curves 
and angles in its course, and hence, wherever its direction 
deviates from that of the wind, it might receive sand drifts 
from the desert plain through which it runs. But, in the 
course of ages, the winds have, in a great measure, bared the 
projecting points of their ancient deposits, and no great accu¬ 
mulations remain in situations from which either a north or a 
south wind would carry them into the valley.f 

The Suez Canal. 

These considerations apply, with equal force, to the sup¬ 
posed danger of the obstruction of the Suez Canal by the drift- 

Arabia, and the testimony of the Bedouins he consulted, are to the same 
purpose. The dangers of the simoom are of a different character, though 
they are certainly aggravated by the blinding effects of the light particles 
of dust and sand borne along by it, and by that of the inhalation of them 
upon the respiration. 

* In the narrow valley of the Kile, bounded as it is, above the Delta, by 
high cliffs, all air currents from the northern quarter become north winds, 
though of course varying in partial direction, in conformity with the sinu¬ 
osities of the valley. Upon the desert plateau they incline westward, and 
have already borne into the valley the sands of the eastern banks, and 
driven those of the western quite out of the Egyptian portion of the Kile 
basin. 

t “ The Korth African desert falls into two divisions: the Sahel, or 
western, and the Sahar, or eastern. The sands of the Sahar were, at a 
remote period, drifted to the west. In the Sahel, the prevailing east 
winds drive the sand-ocean with a progressive westward motion. The 
eastern half of the desert is swept clean.”— Kattmann, Geognosie, ii, p. 1173. 


SANDS OF EGYPT. 


401 


ing of tlie desert sands. The winds across the isthmus are 
almost uniformly from the north, and they swept it clean of 
flying sands long ages since. The traces of the ancient canal 
between the Red Sea and the Nile are easily followed for a 
considerable distance from Suez. Had the drifts upon the 
isthmus been as formidable as some have feared and others 
have hoped, those traces would have been obliterated, and 
Lake Timsah and the Bitter Lakes tilled up, many centuries 
ago. The few particles driven by the rare east and west 
winds toward the line of the canal, would easily be arrested 
by plantations or other simple methods, or removed by dredg¬ 
ing. The real dangers and difficulties of this magnificent 
enterprise—and they are great—consist in the nature of the 
soil to be removed in order to form the line, and especially in 
the constantly increasing accumulation of sea sand at the south¬ 
ern terminus by the tides of the Red Sea, and at the northern, 
by the action of the winds. Both seas are shallow for miles 
from the shore, and the excavation and maintenance of deep 
channels, and of capacious harbors with easy and secure en¬ 
trances, in such localities, is doubtless one of the hardest prob¬ 
lems offered to modern engineers for practical solution. 

Sands of Egypt. 

The sand let fall in Egypt by the north wind is derived, 
not from the desert, but from a very different source—the sea. 
Considerable quantities of sand are thrown up by the Mediter¬ 
ranean, at and between the mouths of the Nile, and indeed 
along almost the whole southern coast of that sea, and drifted 
into the interior to distances varying according to the force of 
the wind and the abundance and quality of the material. The 
sand so transported contributes to the gradual elevation of the 
Delta, and of the banks and bed of the river itself. But just 
in proportion as the bed of the stream is elevated, the height 
of the water in the annual inundations is increased also, and as 
the inclination of the channel is diminished, the rapidity of the 
current is checked, and the deposition of the slime it holds in 


462 


SANDS OF EGYPT. 


suspension consequently promoted. Thus the winds and the 
water, moving in contrary directions, join in producing a com¬ 
mon effect. 

The sand, blown over the Delta and the cultivated land 
higher up the stream during the inundation, is covered or 
mixed with the fertile earth brought down by the river, and 
no serious injury is sustained from it. That spread over the 
same ground after the water has subsided, and during the 
short period when the soil is not stirred by cultivation or cov¬ 
ered by the flood, forms a thin pellicle over the surface as far 
as it extends, and serves to divide and distinguish the succes¬ 
sive layers of slime deposited by the annual inundations. The 
particles taken up by the wind on the sea beach are borne 
onward, by a hopping motion, or rolled along the surface, 
until they are arrested by the temporary cessation of the wind, 
by vegetation, or by some other obstruction, and they may, in 
process of time, accumulate in large masses, under the lee of 
rocky projections, buildings, or other barriers which break the 
force of the wind. 

In these facts we find the true explanation of the sand 
drifts, which have half buried the Sphinx and so many other 
ancient monuments in that part of Egypt. These drifts, as I 
have said, are not primarily from the desert, but from the sea; 
and, as might be supposed from the distance they have trav¬ 
elled, they have been long in gathering. While Egypt was a 
great and flourishing kingdom, measures were taken to protect 
its territory against the encroachment of sand, whether from 
the desert or from the sea; but the foreign conquerors, who 
destroyed so many of its religious monuments, did not spare 
its public works, and the process of physical degradation un¬ 
doubtedly began as early as the Persian invasion. The urgent 
necessity, which has compelled all the successive tyrannies of 
Egypt to keep up some of the canals and other arrangements 
for irrigation, was not felt with respect to the advancement of 
the sands ; for their progress was so slow as hardly to be per¬ 
ceptible in the course of a single reign, and long experience 
has shown that, from the natural effect of the inundations, the 


SAND DUNES AND PLAINS. 


463 


cultivable soil of the valley is, on the whole, trenching upon 
the domain of the desert, not retreating before it. 

The oases of the Libyan, as well as of many Asiatic deserts, 
have no such safeguards. The sands are fast encroaching upon 
them, and threaten soon to engulf them, unless man shall resort 
to artesian wells and plantations, or to some other efficient 
means of checking the advance of this formidable enemy, in 
time to save these islands of the waste from final destruction. 

Accumulations of sand are, in certain cases, beneficial as a 
protection against the ravages of the sea ; but, in general, the 
vicinity, and especially the shifting of bodies of this material, 
are destructive to human industry, and hence, in civilized 
countries, measures are taken to prevent its spread. This, 
however, can be done only where the population is large and 
enlightened, and the value of the soil, or of the artificial erec¬ 
tions and improvements upon it, is considerable. Hence in 
the deserts of Africa and of Asia, and the inhabited lands 
which border on them, no pains are usually taken to check the 
drifts, and when once the fields, the houses, the springs, or the 
canals of irrigation are covered or choked, the district is aban¬ 
doned without a struggle, and surrendered to perpetual deso¬ 
lation.* 

Sand Dunes and Sand Plains. 

Two forms of sand deposit are specially important in Eu¬ 
ropean and American geography. The one is that of dime or 
shifting hillock upon the coast, the other that of barren plain 
in the interior. The coast dunes are composed of sand washed 

* In parts of the Algerian desert, some efforts are made to retard the 
advance of sand dunes which threaten to overwhelm villages. “ At Debila,” 
says Laurent, “ the lower parts of the lofty dunes are planted with palms, 
* * * hut they are constantly menaced with burial by the sands. The 
only remedy employed by the natives consists in little dry walls of crystal¬ 
lized gypsum, built on the crests of the dunes, together with hedges of 
dead palm leaves. These defensive measures are aided by incessant labor; 
for every day the people take up in baskets the sand blown over to them 
the night before and carry it back to the other side of the dune.”— 
Memoires sur le Sahara , p. 14. 


464 


SAND DUNES AND PLAINS. 


up from the depths of the sea by the waves, and heaped in 
knolls and ridges by the winds. The sand with which many 
plains are covered, appears sometimes to have been deposited 
upon them while they were yet submerged, sometimes to have 
been drifted from the sea coast, and scattered over them by 
wind currents, sometimes to have been washed upon them by 
running water. In these latter cases, the deposit, though in 
itself considerable, is comparatively narrow in extent and 
irregular in distribution, while, in the former, it is often evenly 
spread over a very wide surface. In all great bodies of either 
sort, the silicious grains are the principal constituent, though, 
when not resulting from the disintegration of silicious rock 
and still remaining in place, they are generally accompanied 
with a greater or less admixture of other mineral particles, and 
of animal and vegetable remains,* and they are, also, usually 
somewhat changed in consistence by the ever-varying condi¬ 
tions of temperature and moisture to which they have been 
exposed since their deposit. Unless the proportion of these 
latter ingredients is so large as to create a certain adhesiveness 
in the mass—in which case it can no longer prop-erly be called 
sand—it is infertile, and, if not charged with water, partially 
agglutinated by iron, lime, or other cement, or confined by 
alluvion resting upon it, it is much inclined to drift, whenever, 

* Organic constituents, such as comminuted shells, and silicious and 
calcareous exuvite of infusorial animals and plants, are sometimes found 
mingled in considerable quantities with mineral sands. These are usually 
the remains of aquatic vegetables or animals, but not uniformly so, for the 
microscopic organisms, whose flinty cases enter so largely into the sand- 
beds of the Mark of Brandenburg, are still living and prolific in the dry 
earth. See Witt wee, Physikalische Geographies p. 142. 

The desert on both sides of the Nile is inhabited by a land snail, and 
thousands of its shells are swept along and finally buried in the drifts by 
every wind. Every handful of the sand contains fragments of them. 
Forchhammer, in Leonhard und Beonn’s Jahrbuch , 1841, p. 8, says of the 
sand hills of the Danish coast: “ It is not rare to find, high in the knolls, 
marine shells, and especially those of the oyster. They are due to the 
oyster eater [Hcemalopus ostralegus ], which carries his prey to the top of 
the dunes to devour it.” 


COAST DUNES. 


465 


by any chance, the vegetable network which, in most cases, 
thinly clothes and at the same time confines it, is broken. 

Human industry has not only fixed the flying dunes, but, 
by mixing clay and other tenacious earths with the superficial 
stratum of extensive sand plains, and by the application of fer¬ 
tilizing substances, it has made them abundantly productive 
of vegetable life. These latter processes belong to agriculture 
and not to geography, and, therefore, are not embraced within 
the scope of the present subject. But the preliminary steps, 
whereby wastes of loose, drifting barren sands are transformed 
into wooded knolls and plains, and finally, through the accu¬ 
mulation of vegetable mould, into arable ground, constitute a 
conquest over nature which precedes agriculture—a geograph¬ 
ical revolution—and, therefore, an account of the means by 
which the change has been effected belongs properly to the 
history of man’s influence on the great features of physical 
geography. I proceed, then, to examine the structure of 
dunes, and to describe the warfare man wages with the sand 
hills, striving on the one hand to maintain and even extend 
them, as a natural barrier against encroachments of the sea, 
and, on the other, to check their moving and wandering pro¬ 
pensities, and prevent them from trespassing upon the fields he 
has planted and the habitations in which he dwells. 


Coast Dunes. 

Coast dunes are oblong ridges or round hillocks, formed by 
the action of the wind upon sands thrown up by the waves on 
the beach of seas, and sometimes of fresh-water lakes. On 
most coasts, the supply of sand for the formation of dunes is 
derived from tidal waves. The flow of the tide is more rapid, 
and consequently its transporting power greater, than that of 
the ebb ; the momentum, acquired by the heavy particles in 
rolling in with the water, tends to carry them even beyond the 
flow of the waves ; and at the turn of the tide, the water is in 
a state of repose long enough to allow it to let fall much of the 
solid matter it holds in suspension. Hence, on all low, tide- 
80 


466 


COAST DUNES. 


waslied coasts of seas with sandy bottoms, there exist several 
conditions favorable to the formation of sand deposits along 
high-water mark.* If the land winds are of greater fre- 

* There are various reasons why the formation of dunes is confined to 
low shores, and this law is so universal, that when bluffs are surmounted 
by them, there is always cause to suspect upheaval, or the removal of a 
sloping beach in front of the bluff, after the dunes were formed. Bold 
shores are usually without a sufficient beach for the accumulation of large 
deposits; they are commonly washed by a sea too deep to bring u'p sand 
from its bottom; their abrupt elevation, even if moderate in amount, 
would still be too great to allow ordinary winds to lift the sand above 
them; and their influence in deadening the wind which blows toward 
them would even more effectually prevent the raising of sand from the 
beach at their foot. 

Forchhammer, describing the coast of Jutland, says that, in high winds, 
“ one can hardly stand upon the dunes, except when they are near the 
water line and have been cut down perpendicularly by the waves. Then 
the wind is little or not at all felt—a fact of experience very common on 
our coasts, observed on all the steep shore bluffs of two hundred feet in 
height, and, in the Faroe Islands, on precipices two thousand feet high. In 
heavy gales in those islands, the cattle fly to the very edge of the cliffs for 
shelter, and frequently fall over. The wind, impinging against the vertical 
wall, creates an ascending current which shoots somewhat past the crest 
of the rock, and thus the observer or the animal is protected against the 
tempest by a barrier of air.”— Leonhard und Bronx, Jahrbuch , 1841, p. 8. 

The calming, or rather diversion, of the wind by cliffs extends to a con¬ 
siderable distance in front of them, and no wind would have sufficient 
force to raise the sand vertically, parallel to the face of a bluff, even to the 
height of twenty feet. 

It is very commonly believed that it is impossible to grow forest trees 
. on sea-shore bluffs, or points much exposed to strong winds. The obser¬ 
vations just cited tend to show that it would not be difficult to protect trees 
from the mechanical effect of the wind, by screens much lower than the 
height to which they are expected to grow. Recent experiments confirm 
this, and it is found that, though the outer row or rows may suffer from 
the wind, every tree shelters a taller one behind it. Extensive groves have 
thus been formed in situations where an isolated tree would not grow at all. 

Piper, in his Trees of America, p. 19, gives an interesting account of Mr. 
Tudor’s success in planting trees on the bleak and barren shore of Nahant. 
“Mr. Tudor,” observes he, “has planted more than ten thousand trees at 
Nahant, and, by the results of his experiments, has fully demonstrated that 
trees, properly cared for in the beginning, may be made to grow up to the 


DUNES ON SHORES OF LAKE MICHIGAN. 


467 


quency, duration, or strength than the sea winds, the sands 
left by the retreating wave will be constantly blown back into 
the water ; but if the prevailing air currents are in the oppo¬ 
site direction, the sands will soon be carried out of the reach 
of the highest waves, and transported continually farther and 
farther into the interior of the land, unless obstructed by high 
grounds, vegetation, or other obstacles. 

The tide, though a usual, is by no means a necessary con¬ 
dition for the accumulations of sand out of which dunes are 
formed. The Baltic and the Mediterranean are almost tideless 
seas, but there are dunes on the Russian and Prussian coasts 
of the Baltic, and at the mouths of the Rile and many other 
points on the shores of the Mediterranean. The vast shoals in 
the latter sea, known to the ancients as the Greater and Lesser 
Syrtis, are of marine origin. They are still filling up with 
sand, washed up from greater depths, or sometimes drifted 
from the coast in small quantities, and will probably be con¬ 
verted, at some future period, into dry land covered with sand 
hills. There are also extensive ranges of dunes upon the east¬ 
ern shores of the Caspian, and at the southern, or rather south¬ 
eastern extremity of Lake Michigan.* There is no doubt that 
this latter lake formerly extended much farther in that direc¬ 
tion, but its southern portion has gradually shoaled and at last 
been converted into solid land, in consequence of the preva¬ 
lence of the northwest winds. These blow over the lake a 
large part of the year, and create a southwardly set of the cur¬ 
rents, which wash up sand from the bed of the lake and throw 
it on shore. Sand is taken up from the beach at Michigan City 
by every wind from that quarter, and, after a heavy blow of 

• 

very bounds of the ocean, exposed to the biting of the wind and the spray 
of the sea. The only shelter they require is, at first, some interruption to 
break the current of the wind, such as fences, houses, or other trees.” 

* The careful observations of Colonel J. D. Graham, of the United Statep 
Army, show a tide of about three inches in Lake Michigan. See a A Lunar 
Tidal Wave in the North American Lakes,” demonstrated by Lieut.-Colonel 
J. D. Graham, in the fourteenth volume of the Proceedings of the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science. 


468 


FORMATION OF DUNES—SAND BANKS. 


some hours’ duration, sand ridges may be observed on the 
north side of the fences, like the snow wreaths deposited by a 
drifting wind in winter. Some of the particles are carried 
back by contrary winds, but most of them lodge on or behind 
the dunes, or in the moist soil near the lake, or are entangled 
by vegetables, and tend permanently to elevate the level. 
Like effects are produced by constant sea winds, and dunes 
will generally be formed on all low coasts where such prevail, 
whether in tideless or in tidal waters. 

Jobard thus describes the modus ojperandi , under ordinary 
circumstances, at the mouths of the Nile, where a tide can 
scarcely be detected: “ When a wave breaks, it deposits an 
almost imperceptible line of fine sand. The next wave brings 
also its contribution, and shoves the preceding line a little 
higher. As soon as the particles are fairly out of the reach of 
the water they are dried by the heat of the burning sun, and 
immediately seized by the wind and rolled or borne farther 
inland. The gravel is not thrown out by the waves, but rolls 
backward and forward until it is worn down to the state of 
fine sand, when it, in its turn, is cast upon the land and taken 
up by the wind.” * This description applies only to the com¬ 
mon every-day action of wind and water ; but just in propor¬ 
tion to the increasing force of the wind and the waves, there is 
an increase in the quantity of sand, and in the magnitude of 
the particles carried off from the beach by it, and, of course, 
every storm in a landward direction adds sensibly to the accu¬ 
mulation upon the shore. 


Sand Banks. 

Although dunes, properly so called, are found only on dry 
land and above ordinary high-water mark, and owe their 
elevation and structure to the action of the wind, yet, upon 
many shelving coasts, accumulations of sand much resembling 
dunes are formed under water at some distance from the shore 
by the oscillation^ of the waves, and are well known by the 

* Staking, Be Bodern van Nederland , i, p. 327, note. 


DUNES OF AMERICA 


469 


name of sand banks. They are usually rather ridges than 
banks, of moderate inclination, and with the steepest slope sea¬ 
ward ; and their form difiers from that of dunes only in being 
lower and more continuous. Upon the western coast of the 
island of Amrum, for example, there are three rows of such 
banks, the summits of which are at a distance of perhaps a 
couple of miles from each other; so that, including the width 
of the banks themselves, the spaces between them, and the 
breadth of the zone of dunes upon the land, the belt of 
moving sands on that coast is probably not less than eight 
miles wide. 

Under ordinary circumstances, sand banks are always roll¬ 
ing landward, and they compose the magazine from which 
the material for the dunes is derived. The dunes, in fact, are 
but aquatic sand banks transferred to dry land. The laws of 
their formation are closely analogous, because the action of the 
two fluids, by which they are respectively accumulated and 
built up, is very similar when brought to bear upon loose par¬ 
ticles of solid matter. It would, indeed, seem that the slow 
and comparatively regular movements of the heavy, unelastic 
water ought to affect such particles very differently from the 
sudden and fitful impulses of the light and elastic air. But 
the velocity of the wind currents gives them a mechanical 
force approximating to that of the slower waves, and, however 
difficult it may be to explain all the phenomena that charac¬ 
terize the structure of the dunes, observation has proved that 
it is nearly identical with that of submerged sand banks. The 
differences of form are generally ascribable to the greater num¬ 
ber and variety of surface accidents of the ground on which 
the sand hills of the land are built up, and to the more frequent 
changes, and wider variety of direction, in the courses of the 
wind. 

Dunes on the Coast of America. 

Upon the Atlantic coast of the United States, the preva¬ 
lence of western or off-shore winds is unfavorable to the forma¬ 
tion of dunes, and, though marine currents lodge vast quail- 



470 


DUNES OF WESTERN EUROPE. 


tities of sand, in tlie form of banks, on that coast, its shores are 
proportionally more free from sand bills than some others of 
lesser extent. There are, however, very important exceptions. 
The action of the tide throws much sand upon some points of 
the New England coast, as well as upon the beaches of Long 
Island and other more southern shores, and here dunes resem¬ 
bling those of Europe are formed. There are also extensive 
ranges of dunes on the Pacific coast of the United States, and 
at San Francisco they border some of the streets of the city. 

The dunes of America are far older than her civilization, 
and the soil they threaten or protect possesses, in general, too 
little value to justify any great expenditure in measures for 
arresting their progress or preventing their destruction. 
Hence, great as is their extent and their geographical im¬ 
portance, they have, at present, no such intimate relations to 
human life as to render them objects of special interest in the 
point of view I am taking, and I do not know that the laws 
of their formation and motion have been made a subject of 
original investigation by any American observer. 

Dunes of Western Europe. 

Upon the western coast of Europe, on the contrary, the 
ravages occasioned by the movement of sand dunes, and the 
serious consequences often resulting from the destruction of 
them, have long engaged the earnest attention of governments 
and of scientific men, and for nearly a century persevering and 
systematic effort has been made to bring them under human 
control. The subject has been carefully studied in Denmark 
and the adjacent duchies, in Western Prussia, in the Nether¬ 
lands, and in France; and the experiments in the way of 
arresting the drifting of the dunes, and of securing them, and 
the lands they shelter, from the encroachments of the sea, have 
resulted in the adoption of a system of coast improvement sub¬ 
stantially the same in all these countries. The sands, like the 
forests, have now their special literature, and the volumes and 
memoirs, which describe them and the processes employed to 


FORMATION OF DUNES. 


471 


subdue them, are full of scientific interest and of practical 
instruction.* 


Formation of Dunes. 

The laws which govern the formation of dunes are substan¬ 
tially these. We have seen that, under certain conditions, 
sand is accumulated above high-water mark on low sea and 
lake shores. So long as the sand is kept wet by the spray or 
by capillary attraction, it is not disturbed by air currents, but 
as soon as the waves retire sufficiently to allow it to dry, it 

* The principal special works and essays on this subject known to me are: 

Bremontieb, Memoire sur les Dunes, etc., 1790, reprinted in Annales des 
Pouts et Chaussees, 1833, ler s6mestre, pp. 145-186. 

Rapport sur les differents Memoires de M. Bremontier , par Laumont et 
autres, 1806, same volume, pp. 192, 224. 

Lefort, Notice sur les Travaux de Fixation des Dunes , Annales des 
Fonts et Chaussees , 1831, 2me s6mestre, pp. 320-332. 

Forohhammer, Geognostische Studien am Meeres XJfer, in Leonhard 
und Bronn, Jahrbuch, etc., 1841, pp. 1, 38. 

J. G. Konn, Die Inseln und Marschen der Herzogthumer Schleswig und 
Holstein, 1846, vol. ii, pp. 112-162, 193-204. 

Laval, Memoire sur les Dunes du Golfe de Gascogne, Annales des Fonts 
et Chaussees, 1847, 2me s6mestre, pp. 218-268. 

G. 0. A. Krause, Der Dunenbau auf den Ostsee-Kusten West-Preussens, 
1850, 1 vol. 8vo. 

W. O. H. Staring, De Bodem ran Nederland, 1856, vol. i, pp. 310-341, 
and 424—431. 

Same author, Voormaals en Thans, 1858, pages cited. 

O. 0. Andresen, Orn Klitformationen og Klittens Behandling og Besty- 
rclse, 1861, 1 vol. 8vo, x, 392 pp., much the most complete treatise on the 
subject. 

Andresen cites, upon the origin of the dunes: Hull, Over den Oorsprong 
en de Geschiedenis der Hollandsche Duinen, 1838, and Gross’s Veiledning 
red Behandlingen of Sand fug ts tr aiming erne, 1847; and upon the improve¬ 
ment of sand plains by planting, Pannewitz, Anleitung zum Auban der 
Sandfdchen, 1832. I am not acquainted with either of the latter two 
works but I have consulted with advantage, on this subject, Delamarre, 
Historique de la Creation d'une Richesse millionaire par la culture des 
Pins, 1827 ; Boitel, Mise en valeur des terres pauvres par le Pin maritime , 
1857; and Brincken, Ansichten iiber die Bewaldung der Steppen des Eu- 
ropdischen Russlands, 1854. 


472 


FORMATION OF DUNES. 


becomes the sport of the wind, and is driven up the gently 
sloping beach until it is arrested by stones, vegetables, or other 
obstructions, and thus an accumulation is formed which consti¬ 
tutes the foundation of a dune. However slight the elevation 
thus created, it serves to stop or retard the progress of the sand 
grains which are driven against its shoreward face, and to pro¬ 
tect from the further influence of the wind the particles which 
are borne beyond it, or rolled over its crest, and fall down 
behind it. If the shore above the beach line were perfectly 
level and straight, the grass or bushes upon it of equal height, 
the sand thrown up by the waves uniform in size and weight 
of particles as well as in distribution, and if the action of the 
wind were steady and regular, a continuous bank would be 
formed, everywhere alike in height and cross section. But no 
such constant conditions anywhere exist. The banks are 
curved, broken, unequal in elevation; they are sometimes 
bare, sometimes clothed with vegetables of different structure 
and dimensions ; the sand thrown up is variable in quantity 
and character; and the winds are shifting, gusty, vortical, 
and often blowing in very narrow currents. From all these 
causes, instead of uniform hills, there rise irregular rows of 
sand heaps, and these, as would naturally be expected, are of 
a pyramidal, or rather conical shape, and connected at bottom 
by more or less continuous ridges of the same material. 

On a receding coast, dunes will not attain so great a height 
as on more secure shores, because they are undermined and 
carried off before they have time to reach their greatest di¬ 
mensions. Hence, while at sheltered points in Southwestern 
France, there are dunes three hundred feet or more in height, 
those on the Frisic Islands and the exposed parts of the coast 
of Schleswig-Holstein range only from twenty to one hundred 
feet. On the western shores of Africa, it is said that they 
sometimes attain an elevation of six hundred feet. This us one 
of the very few points known to geographers where desert 
sands are advancing seaward, and here they rise to the great¬ 
est altitude to which sand grains can be carried by the wind. 

The hillocks, once deposited, are held together and kept in 


FORMATION OF DUNES. 


473 


shape, partly by mere gravity, and partly by the slight cohe¬ 
sion of the lime, clay, and organic matter mixed with the 
sand; and it is observed that, from capillary attraction, evap¬ 
oration from lower strata, and retention of rain water, they 
are always moist a little below the surface.* By successive 
accumulations, they gradually rise to the height of thirty, 
fifty, sixty, or a hundred feet, and sometimes even much 
higher. Strong winds, instead of adding to their elevation, 
sweep off loose particles from their surface, and these, with 

* “ Dunes are always full of water, from the action of capillary attrac¬ 
tion. Upon the summits, one seldom needs to dig more than a foot to find 
the sand moist, and in the depressions, fresh water is met with near the 
surface.”— Forohhammer, in Leonhard und Bronn, for 1841, p. 5, note. 

On the other hand, Andresen, who has very carefully investigated this 
as well as all other dune phenomena, maintains that the humidity of the 
sand ridges cannot be derived from capillary attraction. He found by 
experiment that drift sand was not moistened to a greater height than 
eight and a half inches, after standing a whole night in water. He 
states the minimum of water contained by the sand of the dunes, one foot 
below the surface, after a long drought, at two per cent., the maximum, 
after a rainy month, at four per cent. At greater depths the quantity is 
larger. The hygroscopicity of the sand of the coast of Jutland he found 
to be thirty-three per cent, by measure, or 21.5 by weight. The annual 
precipitation on that coast is twenty-seven inches, and, as the evaporation 
is about the same, he argues that rain water does not penetrate far beneath 
the surface of the dunes, and concludes that their humidity can be explained 
only by evaporation from below .—Om Klitformationen, pp. 106-110. 

In the dunes of Algeria, water is so abundant that wells are constantly 
dug in them at high points on their surface. They are sunk to the depth 
of three or four metres only, and the water rises to the height of a m&tro 
in them.— Laurent, Memoire sur le Sahara , pp. 11, 12, 18. 

The same writer observes (p. 14) that the hollows in the dunes are 
planted with palms which find moisture enough a little below the surface. 
It would hence seem that the proposal to fix the dunes which are supposed 
to threaten the Suez Canal, by planting the maritime pine and other trees 
upon them, is not altogether so absurd as it is thought to be by some of 
those disinterested philanthropists of other nations who are distressed with 
fears that French capitalists will lose the money they have invested in that 
great undertaking. 

Ponds of water are often found in the depressions between the sand 
hills of the dune chains in the North American desert. 


4T4 


CHARACTER OF DUNE SAND. 


others blown over or between them, build up a second row of 
dunes, and so on according to the character of the wind, the 
supply and consistence of the sand, and the face of the country. 
In this way is formed a belt of sand dunes, irregularly dis¬ 
persed and varying much in height and dimensions, and some¬ 
times many miles in breadth. On the Island of Sylt, in the 
German Sea, where there are several rows, the width of the 
belt is from half a mile to a mile. There are similar ranges 
on the coast of Holland, exceeding two miles in breadth, while 
at the mouths of the Nile they form a zone not less than ten 
miles wide. The base of some of the dunes in the Delta of 
the Nile is reached by the river during the annual inundation, 
and the infiltration of the water, which contains lime, has con¬ 
verted the lower strata into a silicious limestone, or rather a 
calcareous sandstone, and thus afforded an opportunity of 
studying the structure of that rock in a locality where its 
origin and mode of aggregation and solidification are known. 

Character of Dune Sand. 

“ Dune sand,” says Staring, “ consists of well-rounded 
grains of quartz, more or less colored by iron, and often min¬ 
gled with fragments of shells, small indeed, but still visible to 
the naked eye.* These fragments are not constant constit¬ 
uents of dune sand. They are sometimes found at the very 
summits of the hillocks, as at Overveen; in the King’s Dune, 

* According to the French authorities, the dunes of France are not 
always composed of quartzose sand. “ The dune sands ” of different 
characters, says Br6montier, “ partake of the nature of the different mate¬ 
rials which compose them. At certain points on the coast of Normandy 
they are found to be purely calcareous; they are of mixed composition on 
the shores of Brittany and Saintonge, and generally quartzose between the 
mouth of the Gironde and that of the Adour.”— Memoire sur les Dunes , 
Annates des Pouts et Ghaussees , t. vii, 1833, ler s6mestre, p. 146. 

In the dunes of Long Island and of Jutland, there are considerable 
veins composed almost wholly of garnet. For a very full examination of 
the mechanical and chemical composition of the dune sands of Jutland, see 
Andresen, Om Klitformationen , p. 110. 


kohl’s thoughts on dune sand. 


475 


near Egmond, they form a coarse calcareous gravel very 
largely distributed through the sand, while the interior dunes 
between Haarlem and Warmond exhibit no trace of them. It 
is yet undecided whether the presence or absence of these frag¬ 
ments is determined by the period of the formation of the 
dunes, or wdiether it depends on a difference in the process by 
which different dunes have been accumulated. Land shells, 
such as snails, for example, are found on the surface of the 
dunes in abundance, and many of the shelly fragments in 
the interior of the hillocks may be derived from the same 
source.” * 

J. G. Kohl has some poetical thoughts upon the origin and 
character of the dune sands, which are worth quoting: 

“ The sand was composed of pure transparent quartz. I 
could not observe this sand without the greatest admiration. 
If it is the product of the waves, breaking and. crushing flints 
and fragments of quartz against each other; it is a result 
which could be brought about only in the course of countless 
ages. We need not lift ourselves to the stars, to their incal¬ 
culable magnitudes and distances and numbers, in order to 
feel the giddiness of astonishment. Here, upon earth, in the 
simple sand, we find miracle enough. Think of the number 
of sand grains contained in a single dune, then of all the dunes 
upon this widely extended coast—not to speak of the innu¬ 
merable grains in the Arabian, African, and Prussian deserts 
—this, of itself, is sufficient to overwhelm a thoughtful fancy. 
How long, how many times must the waves have risen and 
sunk in order to reduce these vast heaps to powder ! 

66 During the whole time I spent on this coast, I had always 
some sand in my fingers, was rubbing and rolling it about, 
examining it on all sides, holding a little shining grain on the 
tip of my finger, and thinking to myself how, in its corners, 
its angles, its whole configuration, it might very probably 
have a history longer than that of the old German nation— 
possibly longer than that of the human race. Where was the 
original quartz crystal, of which this is a fragment, first 

* Be Bodeni van Nederland , i, p. 82>1 


476 


SAND CONCRETIONS IN DUNES. 


formed ? To wliat was it once fixed ? What power broke it 
loose ? How was it beaten smaller and ever smaller by the 
waves ? They tossed it, for aeons, to and fro upon the beach, 
rolled it up and down, forced it to make thousands and thou¬ 
sands of daily voyages for millions and millions of days. Then 
the wind bore it away, and used it in building up a dune; 
there it lay for centuries, packed in with its fellows, protecting 
the marshes and cherished by the inhabitants, till, seized again 
by the pursuing sea, it fell once more into the water, there to 
begin the endless dance anew—and again to be swept away by 
the wind—and again to find rest in the dunes, a protection 
and a blessing to the coast. There is something mysterious 
about such a grain of sand, and at last I went so far as to fancy 
a little immortal spark linked with each one, presiding over 
its destiny, and sharing its vicissitudes. Could we arm our 
eyes with a microscope, and then dive, like a sparling, into 
one of these dunes, the pile, which is in fact only a heap of 
countless little crystal blocks, would strike us as the most mar¬ 
vellous building upon earth. The sunbeams would pass, with 
illuminating power, through all these little crystalline bodies. 
We should see how every sand grain is formed, by what mul¬ 
tifarious little facets it is bounded, we should even discover 
that it is itself composed of many distinct particles.” * 

Sand concretions form within the dunes and especially in 
the depressions between them. These are sometimes so exten¬ 
sive and impervious as to retain a sufficient supply of water to 
feed perennial springs, and to form small permanent ponds, 
and they are a great impediment to the penetration of roots, 
and consequently to the growth of trees planted, or germinat¬ 
ing from self-sown seeds, upon the dunes, f 

* J. G. Kohl, Die Insetn und Marschen dev Herzog thinner Schleswig und 
Holstein , ii, p. 200. 

t Staring, De Bodem van Nederland , i, p. 317. See also, Bergsoe, 
JRevenUov's Virksomhed , ii, p. 11. 

“In the sand-hill ponds mentioned in the text, there is a vigorous 
growth of bog plants accompanied with the formation of peat, which goes 
on regularly as long as the dune sand does not drift. But if the surface of 
the dunes is broken, the sand blows into the ponds, covers the peat, and 


INTERIOR STRUCTURE OF DUNES. 


477 


Interior Structure of Dunes. 

The interior structure of the dunes, the arrangement of 
their particles, is not, as might be expected, that of an unor¬ 
ganized, confused heap, but they show a strong tendency to 
stratification. This is a point of much geological interest, 
because it indicates that sandstone may owe its stratified char¬ 
acter to the action of wind as well as of water. The origin 
and peculiar character of these layers are due to a variety of 
causes. A southwest wind and current may deposit upon a 
dune a stratum of a given color and mineral composition, and 
this may be succeeded by a northwest wind and current, 
bringing with them particles of a different hue, constitution, 
and origin. 

Again, if we suppose a violent tempest to strew the beach 
with sand grains very different in magnitude and specific grav¬ 
ity, and, after the sand is dry, to be succeeded by a gentle 
breeze, it is evident that only the lighter particles will be 
taken up and carried to the dunes. If, after some time, the 
wind freshens, heavier grains will be transported and depos¬ 
ited on the former, and a still stronger succeeding gale will 
roll up yet larger kernels. Each of these deposits will form a 
stratum. If we suppose the tempest to be followed, after the 
sand is dry, not by a gentle breeze, but by a wind powerful 
enough to lift at the same time particles of very various mag¬ 
nitudes and weights, the heaviest will often lodge on the dune 
while the lighter will be carried farther. This would producG 
a stratum of coarse sand, and the same effect might result from 
the blowing away of light particles out of a mixed layer, while 
the heavier remained undisturbed.* Still another cause of 

i 

puts an end to its formation. When, in the course of time, marine currents 
cut away the coast, the dunes move landward and fill up the ponds, and 
thus are formed the remarkable strata of fossile peat called Martbrv, which 
appears to be unknown to the geologists of other parts of Europe.”— Forch- 
hammee, in Leonhard und Bronn, 1841, p. 18. 

* The lower strata must be older than the superficial layers, and the 
particles which compose them may in time become more disintegrated, and 
therefore finer than those deposited later and above them. 


478 


FORM OF DUNES. 


stratification may be found in the occasional interposition of a 
thin layer of leaves or other vegetable remains between succes¬ 
sive deposits, and this I imagine to be more frequent than has 
been generally supposed. 

The eddies of strong winds between the hillocks must also 
occasion disturbances and re-arrangements of the sand layers, 
and it seems possible that the irregular thickness and the 
strange contortions of the strata of the sandstone at Petra 
may be due to some such cause. A curious observation of 
Professor Forchhammer suggests an explanation of another 
peculiarity in the structure of the sandstone of Mount Seir. 
He describes dunes in Jutland, composed of yellow quartzose 
sand intermixed with black titanian iron. When the wind 
blows over the surface of the dunes, it furrows the sand with 
alternate ridges and depressions, ripples, in short, like those of 
water. The swells, the dividing ridges of the system of sand 
ripples, are composed of the light grains of quartz, while the 
heavier iron rolls into the depressions between, and thus the 
whole surface of the dune appears as if covered with a fine 
black network. 


Form of Dunes . 

The sea side of dunes, being more exposed to the caprices 
of the wind, is more irregular in form than the lee or land side, 
where the arrangement of the particles is affected by fewer 
disturbing and conflicting influences. Hence, the stratification 
of the windward slope is somewhat confused, while the sand in 
the lee side is found to be disposed in more regular beds, in¬ 
clining landward, and with the largest particles lowest, 
where their greater weight would naturally carry them. The 
lee side of the dunes, being thus formed of sand deposited 
according to the laws of gravity, is very uniform in its slope, 
which, according to Forchhammer, varies little from an angle 
of 30° with the horizon, while the more exposed and irregular 
weather side lies at an inclination of from 5° to 10°. When, 
however, the outer tier of dunes is formed so near the water¬ 
line as to be exposed to the immediate action of the waves, it 


GEOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF DUNES. 


479 


is undermined, and the face of the hill is very steep and some¬ 
times nearly perpendicular. 


Geological Importance of Dunes. 

These observations, and other facts which a more attentive 
study on the spot would detect, might furnish the means of 
determining interesting and important questions concerning 
geological formations in localities very unlike those where 
dunes are now thrown up. For example, Studer supposes that 
the drifting sand hills of the African desert were originally 
coast dunes, and that they have been transported to tlieh’ pres¬ 
ent position far in the interior, by the rolling and shifting lee¬ 
ward movement to which all dunes not covered with vegeta¬ 
tion are subject. The present general drift of the sands of that 
desert appears to he to the southwest and west, the prevailing 
winds blowing from the northeast and east; but it has been 
doubted whether the shoals of the western coast of Northern 
Africa, and the sands upon that shore, are derived from the 
bottom of the Atlantic, in the usual manner, or, by an inverse 
process, from those of the Sahara. The latter, as has been 
before remarked, is probably the truth, though observations 
are wanting to decide the question.* There is nothing vio¬ 
lently improbable in the supposition that they may have been 
first thrown up by the Mediterranean on its Libyan coast, and 
thence blown south and west over the vast space they now 
cover. But whatever has been their source and movement, 
they can hardly fail to have left on their route some sandstone 
monuments to mark their progress, such, for example, as we 
have seen are formed from the dune sand at the mouth of the 

i 

Nile; and it is conceivable that the character of the drifting 
sands themselves, and of the conglomerates and sandstones to 
whose formation they have contributed, might furnish satisfac- 

* “ On the west coast of Africa the dunes are drifting seawards, and 
always receiving new accessions from the Sahara. They are constantly 
advancing out into the sea.” See ante , p. 16, note.— Naumann, Geognosie , 

ii, p. 1172. 


480 


GEOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF DUNES. 


tory evidence as to their origin, their starting point, and the 
course by which they have wandered so far from the sea.* 

If the sand of coast dunes is, as Staring describes it, com¬ 
posed chiefly of well-rounded quartzose grains, fragments of 
shells, and other constant ingredients, it would often be recog¬ 
nizable as coast sand, in its agglutinate state of sandstone. 
The texture of this rock varies from an almost imperceptible 
fineness of grain to great coarseness, and affords good facilities 
for microscopic observation of its structure. There are sand¬ 
stones, such, for example, as are used for grindstones, where 
the grit, as it is called, is of exceeding sharpness ; others where 
the angles of the grains are so obtuse that they scarcely act at 
all on hard metals. The former may be composed of grains 
of rock, disintegrated indeed, and recemented together, but 
not, in the meanwhile, much rolled ; the latter, of sands long 
washed by the sea, and drifted by land winds. There is, 

* Forchhammer, after pointing out the coincidence between the in¬ 
clined stratification of dunes and the structure of ancient tilted rocks, 
says : “ But I am not able to point out a sandstone formation correspond¬ 
ing to the dunes. Probably most ancient dunes have been destroyed by 
submersion before the loose sand became cemented to solid stone, but we 
may suppose that circumstances have existed somewhere which have pre¬ 
served the characteristics of this formation.”— Leonhard und Bronn, 
1841, p. 8, 9. 

At the moment of sending my manuscript to the press, I find from 
Laurent {Memoir e sur le Sahara, etc., p. 12) that in the Algerian desert 
there exist “sandstone formations” not only “corresponding to the dunes,” 
but actually consolidated within them. “ A place called El-Mouia-Tadjer 
presents a repetition of what we saw at El-Baya; one of the funnels 
formed in the middle of the dunes contains wells from two metres to two 
and a half in depth, dug in a sand which pressure, and probably the pres¬ 
ence of certain salts, have cemented so as to form true sandstone, soft 
indeed, but which does not yield except to the pickaxe. These sand¬ 
stones exhibit an inclination which seems to be the effect of wind; for 
they conform to the direction of the sands which roll down a scarp occa¬ 
sioned by the primitive obstacle.” 

The dunes near the mouth of the Nile, the lower sands of which have 
been cemented together by the infiltration of Nile water, would probably 
show a similar stratification in the sandstone which now forms their base. 


GEOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF DUNES. 


481 


indeed, so much resemblance between the effects of driving 
winds and of rolling water upon light bodies, that there would 
be difficulty in distinguishing them ; * but after all, it is not 
probable that sandstone, composed of grains thrown up from 
the salt sea, and long tossed by the winds, would be identical 
in its structure with that formed from fragments of rock 
crushed by mechanical force, or disintegrated by heat, and 
again agglutinated without much exposure to the action of 
moving water.f 

* Forclihammer ascribes the resemblance between the furrowing of the 
dune sands and the beach ripples, not to the similarity of the effect of wind 
and water upon sand, but wholly to the action of the former fluid ; in the 
first instance, directly, in the latter, through the water. “ The wind rip¬ 
ples on the surface of the dunes precisely resemble the water ripples of 
sand flats occasionally overflowed by the sea ; and with the closest scrutiny, 
I have never been able to detect the slightest difference between them. 
This is easily explained by the fact, that the water ripples are produced by 
the action of light wind on the water which only transmits the air waves 
to the sand.”— Leonhard und Bronn, 1841, pp. 7, 8. 

t American observers do not agree in their descriptions of the form and 
character of the sand grains which compose the interior dunes of the North 
American desert. C. 0. Parry, geologist to the Mexican Boundary Com¬ 
mission, in describing the dunes near the station at a spring thirty-two 
miles west from the Rio Grande at El Paso, says: “The separate grains 
of the sand composing the sand hills are seen under a lens to be angular, and 
not rounded, as would be the case in regular beach deposits.”— TJ. S. Mexican 
Boundary Survey, Report of, vol. i, Geological Report of C. C. Parry , p. 10. 

In the general description of the country traversed, same volume, p. 
47, Colonel Emory says that on an “examination of the sand with a 
microscope of sufficient power,” the grains are seen to be angular, not 
rounded by rolling in water. 

On the other hand, Blake, in Geological Report, Pacific Railroad Rep., 
vol. y, p. 119, observes that the grains of the dune sand, consisting of 
quartz, chalcedony, carnelian, agate, rose quartz, and probably chrysolite, 
were much rounded} and on page 241, he says that many of the sand grains 
of the Colorado desert are perfect spheres. 

On page 20 of a report in vol. ii of the Pacific Railroad Report , by the 
same observer, it is said that an examination of dune sands brought from 
the Llano Estacado by Captain Pope, showed the grains to be “much 
rounded by attrition.” 

The sands described by Mr. Parry and Colonel Emory are not from the 

31 


482 


INLAND DUNES. 


Inland Dunes. 

I liave met witli some observations indicating a structural 
difference between interior and coast dunes, whicli might per¬ 
haps be recognized in the sandstones formed from these two 
species of sand hills respectively. In the great American des¬ 
ert between the Andes and the Pacific, Meyen found sand 
heaps of a perfect falciform shape.* They were from seven 
to fifteen feet high, the chord of their arc measuring from twenty 
to seventy paces. The slope of the convex face is described as 
very small, that of the concave as high as 70 ° or 80 °, and their 
surfaces were rippled. No smaller dunes were observed, nor 
any in the process of formation. The concave side uniformly 
faced the northwest, except toward the centre of the desert, 
where, for a distance of one or two hundred paces, they grad¬ 
ually opened to the west, and then again gradually resumed the 
former position. 

Pdppig ascribes a falciform shape to the movable, a conical 
to the fixed dunes, or medanos , of the same desert. “ The me¬ 
danos,” he observes, a are hillock-like elevations of sand, some 
having a firm, others a loose base. The former [latter], which 
are always crescent shaped, are from ten to twenty feet high, 
and have an acute crest. The inner side is perpendicular, and 
the outer or bow side forms an angle with a steep inclination 
downward. When driven by violent winds, the medanos pass 
rapidly over the plains. The smaller and lighter ones move 
quickly forward, before the larger ; but the latter soon overtake 
and crush them, whilst they are themselves shivered by the 
collision. These medanos assume all sorts of extraordinary 
figures, and sometimes move along the plain in rows forming 

same localities as those examined by Mr. Blake, and the difference in their 
character may denote a difference of origin or of age. 

* Laurent (Memoire sur le Sahara , pp. 11, 12, and elsewhere) speaks 
of a funnel-shaped depression at a high point in the dunes, as a character¬ 
istic feature of the sand hills of the Algerian desert. This seems to be an 
approximation to the crescent form noticed by Meyen and Pdppig in the 
inland dunes of Peru. 


INLAND DUNES. 


483 


most intricate labyrinths. * * A plain often appears to be 

covered with a row of medanos, and some days afterward it 
is again restored to its level and uniform aspect. * * * 

“ The medanos with immovable bases are formed on the 
blocks of rocks which are scattered about the plain. The sand 
is driven against them by the wind, and as soon as it reaches 
the top point, it descends on the other side until that is likewise 
covered ; thus gradually arises a conical-formed hill. Entire 
hillock chains with acute crests are formed in a similar manner. 
* * * On their southern declivities are found vast masses 

of sand, drifted thither by the mid-day gales. The northern 
declivity, though not steeper than the southern, is only spar¬ 
ingly covered with sand. If a hillock chain somewhat distant 
from the sea extends in a line parallel with the Andes, namely, 
from S. S. E. to N. N. W., the western declivity is almost en¬ 
tirely free of sand, as it is driven to the plain below by the 
southeast wind, which constantly alternates with the wind from 
the south.” * 

It is difficult to reconcile this description with that of Meyen, 
but if confidence is to be reposed in the accuracy of either 
observer, the formation of the sand hills in question must be 
governed by very different laws from those which determine 
the structure of coast dunes. Captain Gilliss, of the American 
navy, found the sand hills of the Peruvian desert to be in gen¬ 
eral crescent shaped, as described by Meyen, and a similar 
structure is said to characterize the inland dunes of the Llano 
Estacado and other plateaus of the North American desert, 
though these latter are of greater height and other dimensions 
than those described by Meyen. There is no very obvious ex¬ 
planation of this difference in form between maritime and 
inland sand hills, and the subject merits investigation.! 

* Travels in Peru , New York, 1848, chap. ix. 

f Notwithstanding the general tendency of isolated coast dunes and 
of the peaks of the sand ridges to assume a conical form, Andresen states 
that the hills of the inner or landward rows are sometimes bow-shaped, 
and sometimes undulating in outline .—Om Klitformationen, p. 84. He 
says further that: “Before an obstruction, two or three feet high and con- 


484 


AGE OF THE DUNES, 


Age, Character, and Permanence of Dunes. 

The origin of most great lines of dunes goes back past all 
history. There are on many coasts, several distinct ranges of 
sand hills which seem to be of very different ages, and to have 
been formed under different relative conditions of land a7id 
water.* In some cases, there has been an upheaval of the coast 

siderably longer, lying perpendicularly to the direction of the wind, the 
sand is deposited with a windward angle of from 6° to 12°, and the bank 
presents a concave face to the wind, while, behind the obstruction, the 
outline is convex; ” and he lays it down as a general rule, that a slope, 
from which sand is blown, is left with a concavity of about one inch of 
depth to four feet of distance; a slope, upon which sand is dropped by the 
wind, is convex. It appears from Andresen’s figures, however, that the 
concavity and convexity referred to, apply, not to the horizontal longi¬ 
tudinal section of the sand bank, as his language unexplained by the 
drawings might be supposed to mean, but to the vertical cross-section , and 
hence the dunes he describes, with the exception above noted, do not cor¬ 
respond to those of the American deserts.— Om Klitformationen, p. 86. 

The dunes of Gascony, which sometimes exceed three hundred feet in 
height, present the same concavity and convexity of vertical cross-section. 
The slopes of these dunes are much steeper than those of the Netherlands 
and the Danish coast; for while all observers agree in assigning to the sea¬ 
ward and landward faces of these latter, respectively, angles of from 5° 
to 12°, and 30° with the horizon, the corresponding faces of the dunes 
of Gascony present angles of from 10° to 25°, and 50° to 60°.— Laval, 
Memoire sur les Dunes de Gascogne , Annales des Pouts et Ghaussees , 1847, 
2me s6mestre. 

* Krause, speaking of the dunes on the coast of Prussia, says: “ Their 
origin belongs to three different periods, in which important changes in 
the relative level of sea and land have unquestionably taken place. * * * 
Except in the deep depressions between them, the dunes are everywhere 
sprinkled, to a considerable height, with brown oxydulated iron, which has 
penetrated into the sand to the depth of from three to eighteen inches, and 
colored it red. * * * Above the iron is a stratum of sand differing in 
composition from ordinary sea sand, and on this, growing woods are always 
found. * * * The gradually accumulated forest soil occurs in beds of 
from one to three feet thick, and changes, proceeding upward, from gray 
sand to black humus.” Even on the third or seaward range, the sand 
grasses appear and thrive luxuriantly, at least on the west coast, though 
Krause doubts whether the dunes of the east coast were ever thus pro¬ 
tected.— Der Diinenbau, pp. 8, 11. 


NAKEDNESS OF DUNES. 


485 


line since the formation of the oldest hillocks, and these have 
become inland dunes, while younger rows have been thrown 
up on the new beach laid bare by elevation of the sea bed. 
Our knowledge of the mode of their first accumulation is de¬ 
rived from observation of the action of wind and water in the 
few instances where, with or without the aid of man, new 
coast dunes have been accumulated, and of the influence of 
wind alone in elevating new sand heaps inland of the coast 
tier, when the outer rows are destroyed by the sea, as also 
when the sodded surface of ancient sands has been broken, and 
the subjacent strata laid open to the air. 

It is a question of much interest, in what degree the naked 
condition of most dunes is to be ascribed to the improvidence 
and indiscretion of man. There are, in Western France, ex¬ 
tensive ranges of dunes covered with ancient and dense forests, 
while the recently formed sand hills between them and the sea 
are bare of vegetation, and are rapidly advancing upon the 
wooded dunes, which they threaten to bury beneath their 
drifts. Between the old dunes and the new, there is no dis¬ 
coverable difference in material or in structure; but the modern 
sand hills are naked and shifting, the ancient, clothed with 
vegetation and fixed. It has been conjectured that artificial 
methods of confinement and plantation were employed by the 
primitive inhabitants of Gaul; and Laval, basing his calcula¬ 
tions on the rate of annual movement of the shifting dunes, 
assigns the fifth century of the Christian era as the period when 
these processes were abandoned.* 

There is no historical evidence that the Gauls were ac¬ 
quainted with artificial methods of fixing the sands of the 
coast, and we have little reason to suppose that they were ad¬ 
vanced enough in civilization to be likely to resort to such 
processes, especially at a period when land could have had but 
a moderate value. 

* Laval, Memoire sur tes Dunes de Gascogne, Annates des Fonts et 
Chaussees , 1847, 2me s6mestrc, p. 231. The same opinion had been ex¬ 
pressed by Be£montiek, Annates des Fonts et Chaussees , 1833, ler s^mestre, 
p. 185. 


486 


DUNES NATURALLY WOODED. 


In other countries, dunes have spontaneously clothed them¬ 
selves with forests, and the rapidity with which their surface 
is covered by various species of sand plants, and finally by 
trees, where man and cattle and burrowing animals are ex¬ 
cluded from them, renders it highly probable that they would, 
as a general rule, protect themselves, if left to the undisturbed 
action of natural causes. The sand hills of the Frische Neh- 
rung, on the coast of Prussia, were formerly wooded down to 
the water’s edge, and it was only in the last century that, in 
consequence of the destruction of their forests, they became 
moving sands.* There is every reason to believe that the 
dunes of the Netherlands were clothed with trees until after 
the Roman invasion. The old geographers, in describing these 
countries, sjDeak of vast forests extending to the very brink of 
the sea; but drifting coast dunes are first mentioned by the 
chroniclers of the Middle Ages, and so far as we know they 
have assumed a destructive character in consequence of the 
improvidence of man.f The history of the dunes of Michigan, 

* “ In the Middle Ages,” says "Willibald Alexis, as quoted by Muller, 
Das Buck der Plazenwelt, i, p. 16, “the Nehrung was extending itself 
further, and the narrow opening near Lochstadt had filled itself up with 
sand. A great pine forest bound with its roots the dune sand and the 
heath uninterruptedly from Danzig to Pillau. King Frederick William I 
was once in want of money. A certain Herr von Korff promised to pro¬ 
cure it for him, without loan or taxes, if he could be allowed to remove 
something quite useless. He thinned out the forests of Prussia, which 
then, indeed, possessed little pecuniary value; but he felled the entire 
woods of the Frische Nehrung, so far as they lay within the Prussian ter¬ 
ritory. The financial operation was a success. The king had money, but 
ill the elementary operation which resulted from it, the state received irrep¬ 
arable injury. The sea winds rush over the bared hills; the Frische Haff 
is half-choked with sand; the channel between Elbing, the sea, and Konigs- 
berg is endangered, and the fisheries in the Haff injured. The operation 
of Herr von Korff brought the king 200,000 thalers. The state would 
now willingly expend millions to restore the forests again.” 

t Staking, Voormaals en Thans , p. 231. Had the dunes of the Nether¬ 
landish and French coasts, at the period of the Roman invasion, resembled 
the moving sand hills of the present day, it is inconceivable that they 
could have escaped the notice of so acute a physical geographer as Strabo: 


PERMANENCE OF DUNE8. 


487 


so far as I have been able to learn from my own observation, 
or that of others, is the same. Thirty years ago, when that 
region was scarcely inhabited, they were generally covered 
with a thick growth of trees, chiefly pines, and underwood, and 
there was little appearance of undermining and wash on the 
lake side, or of shifting of the sands, except where the trees 
had been cut or turned up by the roots.* 

Nature, as she builds up dunes for the protection of the sea 
shore, provides, with similar conservatism, for the preservation 
of the dunes themselves; so that, without the interference of 
man, these hillocks would be, not perhaps absolutely perpetual, 
but very lasting in duration, and very slowly altered in form or 
position. When once covered with the trees, shrubs, and her¬ 
baceous growths adapted to such localities, dunes undergo no 
apparent change, except the slow occasional undermining of 

and the absolute silence of Caesar, Ptolemy, and the encyclopaedic Pliny, 
respecting them, would be not less inexplicable. 

The Old Northern language, the ancient tongue of Denmark, though 
rich in terms descriptive of natural scenery, had no name for dune, nor do 
I think the sand hills of the coast are anywhere noticed in Icelandic liter¬ 
ature. The modern Icelanders, in treating of the dunes of Jutland, call 
them iclettr , hill, cliff, and the Danish Telit is from that source. The word 
Dune is also of recent introduction into German. Had the dunes been 
distinguished from other hillocks, in ancient times, by so remarkable a 
feathre as the propensity to drift, they would certainly have acquired a 
specific name in both Old Northern and German. So long as they were 
wooded knolls, they needed no peculiar name; when they became for¬ 
midable, from the destruction of the woods which confined them, they 
acquired a designation. 

* The sands of Cape Cod were partially, if not completely, covered 
with vegetation by nature. Dr. Dwight, describing the dunes as they 
were in 1800, says : “ Some of them are covered with beach grass ; some 
fringed with whortleberry bushes ; and some tufted with a small and sin¬ 
gular growth of oaks. * * * The parts of this barrier, which are cov¬ 

ered with whortleberry bushes and with oaks, have been either not at all, 
or very little blown. The oaks, particularly, appear to be the continuation 
of the forests originally formed on this spot. * * * They wore all the 
marks of extreme age; were, in some instances, already decayed, and in 
others decaying ; were hoary with moss, and were deformed by branches, 
broken and wasted, not by violence, but by time.”— Travels , iii, p. 91. 


488 


MANAGEMENT OF DUNES. 


the outer tier, and accidental destruction by the exposure of 
the interior, from the burrowing of animals, or the upturning 
of trees with their roots, and all these causes of displacement 
are very much less destructive when a vegetable covering ex¬ 
ists in the immediate neighborhood of the breach. 

Before the occupation of the coasts by civilized and there¬ 
fore destructive man, dunes, at all points where they have been 
observed, seem to have been protected in their rear by forests, 
which served to break the force of the winds in both directions,* 
and to have spontaneously clothed themselves with a dense 
growth of the various plants, grasses, shrubs, and trees, which 
nature has assigned to such soils. It is observed in Europe 
that dunes, though now wdthout the shelter of a forest country 
behind them, begin to protect themselves as soon as human 
trespassers are excluded, and grazing animals denied access to 
them. Herbaceous and arborescent plants spring up almost at 
once, first in the depressions, and then upon the surface of the 
sand hills. Every seed that sprouts, binds together a certain 
amount of sand by its roots, shades a little ground with its 
leaves, and furnishes food and shelter for still younger or 
smaller growths. A succession of a very few favorable seasons 
suffices to bind the whole surface together with a vegetable 
network, and the power of resistance possessed by the dunes 
themselves, and the protection they afford to the fields behind 
them, are just in proportion to the abundance and density of 
the plants they support. 

The growth of the vegetable covering can, of course, be 
much accelerated by judicious planting and watchful care, and 
this species of improvement is now carried on upon a vast 
scale, wherever the value of land is considerable and the popu¬ 
lation dense. In the main, the dunes on the coast of the 
German Sea, notwithstanding the great quantity of often fertile 
• 

* Bergsoe (Reventlovs Virksomhed, ii, 3) states that the dunes on the 
west coast of Jutland were stationary before the destruction of the forests 
to the east of them. The felling of the tall trees removed the resistance 
to the lower currents of the westerly winds, and the sands have since 
buried a great extent of fertile soil. See also same work, ii, p. 124. 


USE OF DUNES. 


489 


land they cover, and the evils which result from their move¬ 
ment, are, upon the whole, a protective and beneficial agent, 
and their maintenance is an object of solicitude with the gov¬ 
ernments and people of the shores they protect.* 


Use of Dunes as a Barrier against the Sea. 

Although the sea throws up large quantities of sand on flat 
lee-shores, there are, as we have seen, many cases where it 
continually encroaches on those same shores and washes them 
away. At all points of the shallow ISTorth Sea where the 
agitation of the waves extends to the bottom, banks are form¬ 
ing and rolling eastward. Hence the sea sand tends to accu¬ 
mulate upon the coast of Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland, and 
were there no conflicting influences, the shore would rapidly 
extend itself westward. But the same waves which wash 
the sand to the coast undermine the beach they cover, and still 
more rapidly degrade the shore at points where it is too high 
to receive partial protection by the formation of dunes upon 
it. The earth of the coast is generally composed of particles 
finer, lighter, and more transportable by water than the sea 
sand. While, therefore, the billows raised by a heavy west 
wind may roll up and deposit along the beach thousands of 
tons of sand, the same waves may swallow up even a larger 
quantity of fine shore earth. This earth, with a portion of the 
sand, is swept off by northwardly and southwardly currents, 
and let fall at other points of the coast, or carried off, altogether, 

* “We must, therefore, not be surprised to see the people here deal as 
gingerly with their dunes, as if treading among eggs. He who is lucky 
enough to own a molehill of dune pets it affectionately, and spends his 
substance in cherishing and fattening it. That fair, fertile, rich province, 
the peninsula of Eiderstadt in the south of Friesland, has, on the point 
toward the sea, only a tiny row of dunes, some six miles long or so ; but 
the people talk of their fringe of sand hills as if it were a border set with 
pearls. They look upon it as their best defence against Neptune. They 
have connected it with their system of dikes, aud for years have kept sen¬ 
tries posted to protect it against wanton injury.”— J. G. Kohl, Lie Inseln 
u. Marschen Schleswig-Holsteins, ii, p. 115. 


490 


ENCROACHMENTS OF THE SEA. 


out of tlie reacli of causes wliicli might bring it back to its 
former position. 

Although, then, the eastern shore of the German Ocean 
here and there advances into the sea, it in general retreats 
before it, and but for the protection afforded it by natural 
arrangements seconded by the art and industry of man, whole 
provinces would soon be engulfed by the waters. This pro¬ 
tection consists in an almost unbroken chain of sand banks and 
dunes, extending from the northernmost point of Jutland to 
the Elbe, a distance of not much less than three hundred miles, 
and from the Elbe again, though with more frequent and w T ider 
interruptions, to the Atlantic borders of France and Spain.* 
So long as the dunes are maintained by nature or by human 
art, they serve, like any other embankment or dike, as a partial 
or a complete protection against the encroachments of the sea; 
and on the other hand, when their drifts are not checked by 
natural processes, or by the industry of man, they become a 
cause of as certain, if not of as sudden, destruction as the 
ocean itself whose advance they retard. 

Encroachments of the Sea . 

The eastward progress of the sea on the Danish and Nether¬ 
landish coast, and on certain shores of the Atlantic, depends so 
much on local geological structure, on the force and direction 
of tidal and other marine currents, on the volume and rapidity 
of coast rivers, on the contingencies of the weather and on 
other varying circumstances, that no general rate can be as¬ 
signed to it. 

* Sand banks sometimes connect themselves with the coast at both 
ends, and thus cut off a portion of the sea. In this case, as well as when 
salt water is enclosed by sea dikes, the water thus separated from the 
ocean gradually becomes fresh, or at least brackish. The Haffs, or large 
expanses of fresh water in Eastern Prussia—which are divided from the 
Baltic by narrow sand banks called Kehrungen, or, at sheltered points of 
the coast, by fluviatile deposits called Werders—all have one or more open 
passages, through which the water of the rivers that supply them at last 
finds its way to the sea. 


THE LIIMFJORD. 


491 


At Agger, near the western end of the Liimfjord, in Jut¬ 
land, the coast was washed away, between the years 1815 and 
1839, at the rate of more than eighteen feet a year. The ad¬ 
vance of the sea appears to have been something less rapid 
for a century betore; but from 1840 to 1857, it gained upon 
the land no less than thirty feet a year. At other points of 
the shore of Jutland, the loss is smaller, but the sea is encroach¬ 
ing generally upon the whole line of the coast.* 


The Liimfjord. 

The irruption of the sea into the fresh-water lagoon of 
Liimfjord in Jutland, in 1825—one of the most remarkable 
encroachments of the ocean in modern times—is expressly as¬ 
cribed to “ mismanagement of the dunes ” on the narrow neck 
of land which separated the fjord from the North Sea. At 
earlier periods, the sea had swept across the isthmus, and even 
burst through it, but the channel had been filled up again, 
sometimes by artificial means, sometimes by the operation of 
natural causes, and on all these occasions effects were produced 
very similar to those resulting from the formation of the new 
channel in 1825, which still remains open.f Within compara¬ 
tively recent historical ages, the Liimfjord has thus been several 
times alternately filled with fresh and with saltwater, and man 
has produced, by neglecting the dunes, or at least might have 
prevented by maintaining them, changes identical with those 
which are usually ascribed to the action of great geological 
causes, and sometimes supposed to have required vast periods 
of time for their accomplishment. 

“ This breach,” says Forchhammer, “ which converted the 
Liimfjord into a sound, and the northern part of Jutland into 
an island, occasioned remarkable changes. The first and most 

* Andresen, Om Klitformationen, pp. 68-72. 

t Id., pp. 231, 232. Andresen’s work, though printed in 1861, was finished 
in 1859. Lyell (Antiquity of Man, 1863, p. 14) says: “ Even in the course 
of the present century, the salt waters have made one eruption into the 
Baltic by the Liimfjord, although they havo been now again excluded.” 


492 


THE LIIMFJORD. 


striking phenomenon was the sudden destruction of almost all 
the fresh-water fish previously inhabiting this lagoon, which 
was famous for its abundant fisheries. Millions of fresh-water 
fish were thrown on shore, partly dead and partly dying, and 
were carted off by the people. A few only survived, and still 
frequent the shores at the mouth of the brooks. The eel, 
however, has gradually accommodated itself to the change of 
circumstances, and is found in all parts of the fjord, while to 
all other fresh-water fish, the salt water of the ocean seems to 
have been fatal. It is more than probable that the sand washed 
in by the irruption covers, in many places, a layer of dead fish, 
and has thus prepared the way for a petrified stratum similar 
to those observed in so many older formations. 

“ As it seems to be a law of nature that animals whose life 
is suddenly extinguished while yet in full vigor, are the most 
likely to be preserved by petrification, we find here one of the 
conditions favorable to the formation of such a petrified stratum. 
The bottom of the Liimfjord was covered with a vigorous 
growth of aquatic plants, belonging both to fresh and to salt 
water, especially Zostera marina. This vegetation totally 
disappeared after the irruption, and, in some instances, was 
buried by the sand; and here again we have a familiar phe¬ 
nomenon often observed in ancient strata—the indication of 
a given formation by a particular vegetable species—and when 
the strata deposited at the time of the breach shall be accessi¬ 
ble by upheaval, the period of eruption will be marked by a 
stratum of Zostera , and probably by impressions of fresh¬ 
water fishes. 

u It is very remarkable that the Zostera marina, a sea plant, 
was destroyed even where no sand was deposited. This was 
probably in consequence of the sudden change from brackish to 
salt water. * * It is well established that the Liimfjord 

communicated with the German Ocean at some former period. 
To that era belong the deep beds of oyster shells and Ca/rdium 
edule , which are still found at the bottom of the fjord. And 
now, after an interval of centuries, during which the lagoon 
contained no salt-water shell fish, it again produces great num- 


ENCROACHMENTS OF THE SEA. 


493 


bers of Mytilus edulis. Could we obtain a deep section of tlie 
bottom, we should find beds of Ostrea edulis and Cardium 
edule , then a layer of Zostera marina with fresh-water fish, 
and then a bed of Mytilus edulis. If, in course of time, the 
new channel should be closed, the brooks would fill the lagoon 
again with fresh water; fresh-water fish and shell fish would 
reappear, and thus we should have a repeated alternation 
of organic inhabitants of the sea and of the waters of the 
land. 

u These events have been accompanied with but a com¬ 
paratively insignificant change of land surface, while the for¬ 
mations in the bed of this inland sea have been totally revo¬ 
lutionized in character.” * 

Coasts of Schleswig-Holstein , Holland , and France. 

On the islands on the coast of Schleswig-Holstein, the ad¬ 
vance of the sea has been more unequivocal and more rapid. 
Near the beginning of the last century, the dunes which had 
protected the western coast of the island of Sylt began to roll 
to the east, and the sea followed closely as they retired. In 
1757, the church of Han turn, a village upon that island, was 
obliged to be taken down in consequence of the advance of the 
sand hills; in 1791, these hills had passed beyond its site, the 
waves had swallowed up its foundations, and the sea gained so 
rapidly, that, fifty years later, the spot where they lay was 
seven hundred feet from the shore, f 

The most prominent geological landmark on the coast of 
Holland is the Huis te Britten, Arx Britannica , a fortress 
built by the Homans, in the time of Caligula, on the main 
land near the mouth of the Rhine. At the close of the seven¬ 
teenth century, the sea had advanced sixteen hundred paces 
beyond it. The older Dutch annalists record, with much pa¬ 
rade of numerical accuracy, frequent encroachments of the sea 

* Foeohhammee, Geognostische Studien am Meeres-Ufer. Leonhard und 
Bbonn, Jahrbuch , 1841, pp. 11, 13. 

f Andresen, Om Klitformationen , pp. 68, 72. 


494 


ENCROACHMENTS OF THE SEA. 


upon many parts of the Netherlandish coast. But though the 
general fact of an advance of the ocean upon the land is es¬ 
tablished beyond dispute, the precision of the measurements 
which have been given is open to question. Staring, however, 
who thinks the erosion of the coast much exaggerated by popu¬ 
lar geographers, admits a loss of more than a million and a 
half acres, chiefly worthless morass;* and it is certain that 
but for the resistance of man, but for his erection of dikes and 
protection of dunes, there would now be left of Holland little 
but the name. It is, as has been already seen, still a debated 
question among geologists whether the coast of Holland now 
is, and for centuries has been, subsiding. I believe most in¬ 
vestigators maintain the affirmative ; and if the fact is so, the 
advance of the sea upon the land is, in part, due to this cause. 
But the rate of subsidence is at all events very small, and 
therefore the encroachments of the ocean upon the coast are 
mainly to be ascribed to the erosion and transportation of the 
soil by marine waves and currents. 

The sea is fast advancing at several points of the western 
coast of France, and unknown causes have given a new impulse 
to its ravages since the commencement of the present century. 
Between 1830 and 1842, the Point de Grave, on the north side 
of the Gironde, retreated one hundred and eighty metres, or 
about fifty feet per year; from the latter year to 1846, the rate 
was increased to more than three times that quantity, and the 
loss in those four years was above six hundred feet;. All the 
buildings at the extremity of the peninsula have been taken 
down and rebuilt farther landward, and the lighthouse of the 
Grave now occupies its third position. The sea attacked the 
base of the peninsula also, and the Point de Grave and the ad¬ 
jacent coasts have been for twenty years the scene of one of 
the most obstinately contested struggles between man and the 
ocean recorded in the annals of modern engineering. 

It cannot, indeed, be affirmed that human power is able to 
arrest altogether the incursions of the waves on sandy coasts, 


* Voormaah en Thans , pp. 126,170. 




DRIFTING OF DUNE SANDS. 


495 


by planting tlie beach, and clothing the dnnes with wood. On 
the contrary, both in Holland and on the French coast, it has 
been found necessary to protect the dnnes themselves by piling 
and by piers and sea walls of heavy masonry. But experience 
has amply shown that the processes referred to are entirely 
successful in preventing the movement of the dunes, and the 
drifting of their sands over cultivated lands behind them ; and 
that, at the same time, the plantations very much retard the 
landward progress of the waters.* 

Drifting of Dune Sands. 

Besides their importance as a barrier against the inroads 
of the ocean, dunes are useful by sheltering the cultivated 
ground behind them from the violence of the sea wind, from 
salt spray, and from the drifts of beach sand which would 
otherwise overwhelm them. But the dunes themselves, unless 
their surface sands are kept moist, and confined by the growth 
of plants, or at least by a crust of vegetable earth, are con¬ 
stantly rolling inward; and thus, while, on one side, they lay 
bare the traces of ancient human habitations or other evidences 
of the social life of primitive man, they are, on the other, bury¬ 
ing fields, houses, churches, and converting populous districts 
into barren and deserted wastes. 

Especially destructive are they when, by any accident, a 
cavity is opened into them to a considerable depth, thereby 
giving the wind access to the interior, where the sand is thus 
first dried, and then scooped out and scattered far over the 
neighboring soil. The dune is now a magazine of sand, no 
longer a rampart against it, and mischief from this source 
seems more difficult to resist than from almost any other drift, 
because the supply of material at the command of the wind, is 
more abundant and more concentrated than in its original thin 
and widespread deposits on the beach. The burrowing of 

* See a very interesting article entitled “ Le Littoral de la France,” by 
£lis£e Reclus, in the Revue des Deux Mondes , for December, 1862, pp. 
901, 936. 


496 


DUNES OF GASCONY. 


conies in the dunes is, in this way, not unfrequently a cause of 
their destruction and of great inj ury to the fields behind them. 
Drifts, and even inland sand hills, sometimes result from break¬ 
ing the surface of more level sand deposits, far within the 
range of the coast dunes. Thus we learn from Staring, that 
one of the highest inland dunes in Friesland owes its origin to 
the opening of the drift sand by the uprooting of a large oak.* 

Great as are the ravages produced by the encroachment of 
the sea upon the western shores of continental Europe, they 
have been in some degree compensated by spontaneous marine 
deposits at other points of the coast, and we have seen in a 
former chapter that the industry of man has reclaimed a large 
territory from the bosom of the ocean. These latter triumphs 
are not of recent origin, and the incipient victories which paved 
the way for them date back perhaps as far as ten centuries. 
In the mean time, the dunes had been left to the operation of 
the laws of nature, or rather freed, by human imprudence, 
from the fetters with which nature had bound them, and it is 
scarcely three generations since man first attempted to check 
their destructive movements. As they advanced, he unresist¬ 
ingly yielded and retreated before them, and they have buried 
under their sandy billows many hundreds of square miles of 
luxuriant cornfields and vineyards and forests. 

Dunes of Gascony. 

On the west coast of France, a belt of dunes, varying in 
width from a quarter of a mile to five miles, extends from the 
Adour to the estuary of the Gironde, and covers an area of 
three hundred and seventy-five square miles. When not fixed 
by vegetable growths, they advance eastward at a mean rate 
of about one rod, or sixteen and a half feet, a year. We do 
not know historically when they began to drift, but if we sup¬ 
pose their motion to have been always the same as at present, 
they would have passed over the space between the sea coast 


* De Bodem van Nederland , i, p. 425. 




BUNKS OF DENMARK. 


497 


and tlieir eastern boundary, and covered the large area above 
mentioned, in fourteen hundred years. We know, from writ¬ 
ten records, that they have buried extensive fields and forests 
and thriving villages, and changed the courses of rivers, and 
that the lighter particles carried from them by the winds, even 
where not transported in sufficient quantities to form sand 
hills, have rendered sterile much land formerly fertile.* They 
have also injuriously obstructed the natural drainage of the 
maritime districts by choking up the beds of the streams, and 
forming lakes and pestilential swamps of no inconsiderable ex¬ 
tent. In fact, so completely do they embank the coast, that 
between the Gironde and the village of Mimizan, a distance of 
one hundred miles, there are but two outlets for the discharge 
of all the waters which flow from the land to the sea; and the 
eastern front of the dunes is bordered by a succession of stag¬ 
nant pools, some of which are more than six miles in length 
and breadth.f 
% 

The Dunes of Denmark and Prussia. 

In the small kingdom of Denmark, inclusive of the duchies 
of Schleswig and Holstein, the dunes cover an area of more 
than two hundred and sixty square miles. The breadth of the 

* The movement of the dunes has been hardly less destructive on the 
north side of the Gironde. See the valuable article of LlisIse Reoltjs 
already referred to, in the Revue des Deux Mondes , for December, 1862, 
entitled “ Le Littoral de la France.” 

t Laval, Memoire sur les Dunes du Golfe de Gascogne , Annales des 
Fonts et Gliaussees , 1847, p. 223. The author adds, as a curious and unex¬ 
plained fact, that some of these pools, though evidently not original for¬ 
mations but mere accumulations of water dammed up by the dunes, have, 
along their western shore, near the base of the sand hills, a depth of more 
than one hundred and thirty feet, and hence their bottoms are not less 
than eighty feet below the level of the lowest tides. Their western banks 
descend steeply, conforming nearly to the slope of the dunes, while on the 
northeast and south the inclination of their beds is very gradual. The 
greatest depth of these pools corresponds to that of the sea ten miles from 
the shore. Is it possible that the weight of the sands has pressed together 
the soil on which they rest, and thus occasioned a subsidence of the surface 
extending beyond their base ? 

32 


498 


DUNES OF PRUSSIA. 


chain is very various, and in some places it consists only of a 
single row of sand hills, while in others, it is more than six 
miles wide. The general rate of eastward movement of the 
drifting dunes is from three to twenty-four feet per annum. 
If we adopt the mean of thirteen feet and a half for the annual 
motion, the dunes have traversed the widest part of the belt in 
about twenty-five hundred years. Historical data are wanting 
as to the period of the formation of these dunes and of the 
commencement of their drifting; but there is recorded evi¬ 
dence that they have buried a vast extent of valuable land 
within three or four centuries, and further proof is found in 
the fact that the movement of the sands is constantly uncover¬ 
ing ruins of ancient buildings, and other evidences of human 
occupation, at points far within the present limits of the unin¬ 


habitable desert. Andresen estimates the average depth of the 
sand deposited over this area at thirty feet, which would give 
a cubic mile and a half for the total quantity.* 

The drifting of the dunes on the coast of Prussia com¬ 
menced not much more than a hundred years ago. The 
Frische Nehrung is separated from the mainland by the 
Frische Haff, and there is but a narrow strip of arable land 
along its eastern borders. Hence its rolling sands have covered 
a comparatively small extent of dry land, but fields and vil¬ 
lages have been buried and valuable forests laid waste by 
them. The loose coast row has drifted over the inland ranges, 
which, as was noticed in the description of these dunes on a 
former page, were protected by a surface of different composi¬ 
tion, and the sand has thus been raised to a height which it 
could not have reached upon level ground. This elevation has 
enabled it to advance upon and overwhelm woods, which, upon 
a plain, would have checked its progress, and, in one instance, 
a forest of many hundred acres of tall pines was destroyed by 
the drifts between 1804 and 1827. 




Control of Dunes by Man. 

There are three principal modes in which the industry of 
* Andresen, Orn Klitformationem , pp. 56, 79, 82. 


ARTIFICIAL DUNES. 


499 


man is brought to bear upon the dunes. First, the creation of 
them, at points where, from changes in the currents or other 
causes, new encroachments of the sea are threatened; second, 
the maintenance and protection of them where they have been 
naturally formed ; and third, the removal of the inner rows 
where the belt is so broad that no danger is to be apprehended 
from the loss of them. 

Artificial Formation of Dunes . 

In describing the natural formation of dunes, it was said 
that they began with an accumulation of sand around some 
vegetable or other accidental obstruction to the drifting of the 
particles. A high, perpendicular cliff, which deadens the wind 
altogether, prevents all accumulation of sand; but, up to a 
certain point, the higher and broader the obstruction, the more 
sand will heap up in front of it, and the more will that which 
falls behind it be protected from drifting farther. This familiar 
observation has taught the inhabitants of the coast that an 
artificial wall or dike will, in many situations, give rise to a 
broad belt of dunes. Thus a sand dike or wall, of three or four 
miles in length, thrown in 1610 across the Koegras, a tide- 
washed flat between the Zuiderzee and the North Sea, has 
occasioned the formation of rows of dunes a mile in breadth, 
and thus excluded the sea altogether from the Koegras. A 
similar dike, called the Zyperzeedyk, has produced another 
scarcely less extensive belt in the course of two centuries. 

A few years since,, the sea was threatening to cut through 
the island of Ameland, and, by encroachment on the southern 
side and the blowing off of the sand from a low flat which con¬ 
nected the two higher parts of the island, it had made such 
progress, that in heavy storms the waves sometimes rolled 
quite across the isthmus. The construction of a breakwater 
and a sand dike have already checked the advance of the sea, 
and a large number of sand hills has been formed, the rapid 
growth of which promises complete future security against 
both wind and wave. Similar effects have been produced by 


500 


PROTECTION OF DUNES. 


the erection of plank fences, and even of simple screens of 
wattling and reeds.* 


Protection of Dunes. 

The dunes of Holland are sometimes protected from the 
dashing of the waves by a revetement of stone, or by piles; 
and the lateral high-water currents, which wash away their 
base, are occasionally checked by transverse walls running 
from the foot of the dunes to low-water mark ; but the great 
expense of such constructions has prevented their adoption on 
a large scale.f The principal means relied on for the pro¬ 
tection of the sand hills are the planting of their surfaces and 
the exclusion of burrowing and grazing animals. There are 
grasses, creeping plants, and shrubs of spontaneous growth, 
which flourish in loose sand, and, if protected, spread over con¬ 
siderable tracts, and finally convert their face into a soil ca¬ 
pable of cultivation, or, at least, of producing forest trees. 
Krause enumerates one hundred and seventy-one plants as 
native to the coast sands of Prussia, and the observations of 
Andresen in Jutland carry the number of these vegetables up 
to two hundred and thirty-four. 

Some of these plants, especially the Arundo arenaria or 
arenosa , or Psamma or Psammophila arenaria —Klittetag, or 
Hjelme in Danish, helm in Dutch, Diinenhalm, Sandschilf, or 
Hiigelrohr in German, gourbet in French, and marram in 
English—are exclusively confined to sandy soils, and thrive 

* Staring, De Bodem van Nederland , i, pp. 329-331. Id., Voormaals 
en Thans , p. 163. Andresen, Om Klit/ormationen , pp. 280, 295. 

The creation of new dunes, by the processes mentioned in the text, 
seems to he much older in Europe than the adoption of measures for se¬ 
curing them by planting. Dr. Dwight mentions a case in Massachusetts, 
where a beach was restored, and new dunes formed, by planting beach 
grass. “ Within the memory of my informant, the sea broke over the 
beach which connects Truro with Province Town, and swept the body of 
it away for some distance. The beach grass was immediately planted on 
the spot; in consequence of which the beach was again raised to a suffi¬ 
cient height, and in various places into hills.”— Dwight's Travels , iii, p. 93, 
fid., i, pp. 310, 332. 


PROTECTION OE DUNES. 


501 


well only in a saline atmosphere.* The arundo grows to the 
height of about twenty-four inches, but sends its strong roots 
with their many rootlets to a distance of forty or fifty feet. It 
has the peculiar property of flourishing best in the loosest soil, 
and a sand shower seems to refresh it as the rain revives the 
thirsty plants of the common earth. Its roots bind together the 
dunes, and its leaves protect their surface. When the sand 
ceases to drift, the arundo dies, its decaying roots fertilizing 
the sand, and the decomposition of its leaves forming a layer 
of vegetable earth over it. Then follows a succession of other 
plants which gradually fit the sand hills, by growth and decay, 
for forest planting, for pasturage, and sometimes for ordinary 
agricultural use. 

But the protection and gradual transformation of the dunes 
is not the only service rendered by this valuable plant. Its 
leaves are nutritious food for sheep and cattle, its seeds for 
poultry ; f cordage and netting twine are manufactured from 
its fibres, it makes a good material for thatching, and its dried 
roots furnish excellent fuel. These useful qualities, unfortu¬ 
nately, are too often prejudicial to its growth. The peasants 
feed it down with their cattle, cut it for rope making, or dig it 
up for fuel, and it has been found necessary to resort to severe 
legislation to prevent them from bringing ruin upon them¬ 
selves by thus improvidently sacrificing their most effectual 
safeguard against the drifting of the sands.$ 

In 1539, a decree of Christian III, king of Denmark, im¬ 
posed a fine upon persons convicted of destroying certain spe¬ 
cies of sand plants upon the west coast of Jutland. This ordi¬ 
nance was renewed and made more comprehensive in 1558, 

* There is some confusion in the popular use of these names, and in 
the scientific designations of sand plants, and they are possibly applied to 
different plants in different places. Some writers style the gourbet Cala- 
magrostis arenaria, and distinguish it from the Danish Klittetag or Hjelme. 

f Bread, not indeed very palatable, has been made of the seeds of the 
arundo. but the quantity which can be gathered is not sufficient to form an 
important economical resource.— Andeesen, Oni Klitformationen, p. 160. 

| Bergsoe, Reventlovs Virksomhed , ii, p. 4. 


502 


DUNES OF DENMARK. 


and in 1569 tlie inhabitants of several districts were required, 
by royal rescript, to do their best to check the sand drifts, 
though the specific measures to be adopted for that purpose 
are not indicated. Various laws against stripping the dunes 
of their vegetation were enacted in the following century, but 
no active measures were taken for the subjugation of the sand 
drifts until 1779, when a preliminary system of operation for 
that purpose was adopted. This consisted in little more than 
the planting of the Arundo avenaria and other sand plants, 
and the exclusion of animals destructive to these vegetables.* 

* Measures were taken for the protection of the dunes of Cape Cod, in 
Massachusetts, during the colonial period, though I believe they are now 
substantially abandoned. A hundred years ago, before the valley of the 
Mississippi, or even the rich plains of Central and Western New York, 
were opened to the white settler, the value of land was relatively much 
greater in New England than it is at present, and consequently some rural 
improvements were then worth making, which would not now yield suffi¬ 
cient returns to tempt the investment of capital. The money and the time 
required to subdue and render productive twenty acres of sea sand on Cape 
Cod, would buy a “ section ” and rear a family in Illinois. The son of the 
Pilgrims, therefore, abandons the sand hills, and seeks a better fortune on 
the fertile prairies of the West. 

Dr. Dwight, who visited Cape Cod in the year 1800, after describing 
the “ beach grass, a vegetable bearing a general resemblance to sedge, but 
of a light bluish-green, and of a coarse appearance,” which “flourishes 
with a strong and rapid vegetation on the sands,” observes that he received 
“from a Mr. Collins, formerly of Truro, the following information:” 
“ When he lived at Truro, the inhabitants were, under the authority of 
law, regularly warned in the month of April, yearly, to plant beach grass, 
as, in other towns of New England, they are warned to repair highways. 
It was required by the laws of the State, and under the proper penalties 
for disobedience ; being as regular a public tax as any other. The people, 
therefore, generally attended and performed the labor. The grass was dug 
in bunches, as it naturally grows ; and each hunch divided into a number 
of smaller ones. These were set out in the sand at distances of three feet. 
After one row was set, others were placed behind it in such a manner as to 
shut up the interstices; or, as a carpenter would say, so as to break the 
joints. * * * When it is once set, it grows and spreads with rapidity. 
* * * The seeds are so heavy that they bend down the heads of the 
grass; and when ripe, drop directly down by its side, where they imme¬ 
diately vegetate. Thus in a short time the ground is covered. 






DUNES OF DENMARK. 


503 


Ten years later, plantations of forest trees, which have since 
proved so valuable a means of fixing the dunes and rendering 
them productive, were commenced, and have been continued 
ever since.* During this latter period, Bremontier, without 
any knowledge.of what was doing in Denmark, experimented 
upon the cultivation of forest trees on the dunes of Gascony, 
and perfected a system, which, with some improvements in 

“ Where this covering is found, none of the sand is blown. On the 
contrary, it is accumulated and raised continually as snow gathers and 
rises among hushes, or branches of trees cut and spread upon the earth. 
Nor does the grass merely defend the surface on which it is planted ; hut 
rises, as that rises by new accumulations ; and always overtops the sand, 
however high that may he raised by the wind.”— Dwight's Travels in New 
England and New York, ii, p. 92, 93. 

This information was received in 1800, and it relates to a former state 
of things, probably more than twenty years previous, and earlier than 
1779, when the Government of Denmark first seriously attempted the con¬ 
quest of the dunes. 

The depasturing of the beach grass—a plant allied in habits, if not in 
botanical character, to the arundo—has been attended with very injurious 
effects in Massachusetts. Dr. Dwight, after referring to the laws for its 
propagation, already cited, says: “ The benefit of this useful plant, and of 
these prudent regulations, is, however, in some measure lost. There are in 
Province Town, as I was informed, one hundred and forty cows. These 
animals, being stinted in their means of subsistence, are permitted to 
wander, at times, in search of food. In every such case, they make depre¬ 
dations on the beach grass, and prevent its seeds from being formed. In 
this manner the plant is ultimately destroyed.”— Travels, iii, p. 94. 

On page 101 of the same volume, the author mentions an instance of 
great injury from this cause. “ Here, about one thousand acres were 
entirely blown away to the depth, in many places, of ten feet. * * * 

Not a green thing was visible except the whortleberries, which tufted a 
few lonely hillocks rising to the height of the original surface and prevented 
by this defence from being blown away also. These, although they varied 
the prospect, added to the gloom by their strongly picturesque appearance, 
by marking exactly the original level of the plain, and by showing us in 
this manner the immensity of the mass which had been thus carried away 
by the wind. The beach grass had been planted here, and the ground had 
been formerly enclosed ; but the gates had been left open, and the cattle 
had destroyed this invaluable plant.” 

* Andreskn, Om Klitformationen, pp. 237, 240. 


504 


DUNES OF GASCONY. 


matters of detail, is still largely pursued on tliose shores. The 
example of Denmark was soon followed in the neighboring 
kingdom of Prussia, and in the Netherlands ; and, as we shall 
see hereafter, these improvements have been everywhere 
crowned with most flattering success. 

Under the administration of Beventlov, a little before the 
close of the last century, the Danish Government organized a 
regular system of improvement in the economy of the dunes. 
They were planted with the arundo and other vegetables of 
similar habits, protected agaiust trespassers, and at last partly 
covered with forest trees. By these means much waste soil has 
been converted into arable ground, a large growth of valuable 
timber obtained, and the further spread of the drifts, which 
threatened to lay waste the whole peninsula of Jutland, to a 
considerable extent arrested. 

In France, the operations for fixing and reclaiming the 
dunes—which began under the direction of Bremontier about 
the same time as in Denmark, and which are, in principle and 
in many of their details, similar to those employed in the latter 
kingdom—have been conducted on a far larger scale, and with 
greater success, than in any other country. This is partly 
owing to a climate more favorable to the growth of suitable 
forest trees than that of Northern Europe, and partly to the 
liberality of the Government, which, having more important 
landed interests to protect, has put larger means at the disposal 
of the engineers than Denmark and Prussia have found it con¬ 
venient to appropriate to that purpose. The area of the dimes 
already secured from drifting, and planted by the processes in¬ 
vented by Bremontier and perfected by his successors, is about 
100,000 acres.* This amount of productive soil, then, has been 
added to the resources of France, and a still greater quantity 

N 

* “ These plantations, perseveringly continued from the time of Br6- 
montier now cover more than 40,000 hectares, and compose forests which 

are not only the salvation of the department, but constitute its wealth.”_ 

ClavIs, fitudes Forestieres , p. 254. 

Other authors have stated the plantations of the French dunes to be 
much more extensive. 






TREES SUITED TO DUNE PLANTATIONS. 


505 


of valuable land has been thereby rescued from the otherwise 
certain destruction with which it was threatened by the ad¬ 
vance of the rolling sand hills. 

The improvements of the dunes on the coast of West Prussia 
began in 1795, under Sdren Bjorn, a native of Denmark, and, 
with the exception of the ten years between 1807 and 1817, 
they have been prosecuted ever since. The methods do not 
differ essentially from those employed in Denmark and Prance, 
though they are modified by local circumstances, and, with 
respect to the trees selected for planting, by climate. In 1850? 
between the mouth of the Yistula and Kahlberg, 6,300 acres, 
including about 1,900 acres planted with pines and birches ? 
had been secured from drifting; between Kahlberg and the 
eastern boundary of West-Prussia, 8,000 acres; and important 
preliminary operations had been carried on for subduing the 
dunes on the west coast.* 

Trees suited to Dune Plantations. 

The tree which has been found to thrive best upon the 
sand hills of the French coast, and at the same time to confine 
the sand most firmly and yield the largest pecuniary returns, 
is the maritime pine, Pinus maritima , a species valuable both 
for its timber and for its resinous products. It is always grown 
from seed, and the young shoots require to be protected for 
several seasons, by the branches of other trees, planted in rows, 
or spread over the surface and staked down, by the growth of 
the Arundo arenaria , and other small sand plants, or by wat¬ 
tled hedges. The beach, from which the sand is derived, has 
been generally planted with the arundo, because the pine does 
not thrive well so near the sea ; but it is thought that a species 
of tamarisk is likely to succeed in that latitude even bettei 
than the arundo. The shade and the protection offered by the 
branching top of this pine are favorable to the growth of decid¬ 
uous trees, and, while still young, of shrubs and smaller plants, 
which contribute more rapidly to the formation of vegetable 


* Kruse, Diinenlau, pp. 34 , 38 , 40 . 


506 


THE MARITIME PINE. 


mould, and thus, when the pine has once taken root, the re¬ 
demption of the waste is considered as effectually secured. 

In France, the maritime pine is planted on the sands of the 
interior as well as on the dunes of the sea coast, and with equal 
advantage. This tree resembles the pitch pine of the Southern 
American States in its habits, and is applied to the same uses. 
The extraction of turpentine from it begins at the age of about 
twenty years, or when it has attained a diameter of from nine 
to twelve inches. Incisions are made up and down the trunk, 
to the depth of about half an inch in the wood, and it is insist¬ 
ed that if not more than two such slits are cut, the tree is not 
sensibly injured by the process. The growth, indeed, is some¬ 
what checked, but the wood becomes superior to that of trees 
from which the turpentine is not extracted. Thus treated, the 
pine continues to flourish to the age of one hundred or one 
hundred and twenty years, and up to this age the trees on a 
hectare yield annually 350 kilogrammes of essence of turpen¬ 
tine, and 280 kilogrammes of resin, worth together 110 francs. 
The expense of extraction and distillation is calculated at 44 
francs, and a clear profit of 66 francs per hectare, or more than 
five dollars per acre, is left.* This is exclusive of the value of 
the timber, when finally cut, which, of course, amounts to a 
very considerable sum. 

In Denmark, where the climate is much colder, hardier 
conifers, as well as the birch and other northern trees, are 
found to answer a better purpose than the maritime pine, and 

* These processes are substantially similar to those employed in the 
pineries of the Carolinas, but they are better systematized and more 
economically conducted in France. In the latter country, all the products 
of the pine, even to the cones, find a remunerating market, while, in 
America, the price of resin is so low, that in the fierce steamboat races 
on the great rivers, large quantities of it are thrown into the furnaces to 
increase the intensity of the fires. In a carefully prepared article on the 
Southern pineries published in an American magazine—I think Harper’s— 
a few years ago, it was stated that the resin from the turpentine distilleries 
was sometimes allowed to run to waste; and the writer, in one instance, 
observed a mass, thus rejected as rubbish, which was estimated to amount 
to two thousand barrels. 



TOTAL EXTENT OF DUNES. 


507 


it is doubtful whether this tree would be able to resist the win¬ 
ter on the dunes of Massachusetts. Probably the pitch pine of 
the Northern States, in conjunction with some of the American 
oaks, birches, and poplars, and especially the robinia or locust, 
would prove very suitable to be employed on the sand hills of 
Cape Cod and Long Island. The ailantlius, now coming into 
notice as a sand-loving tree, may, perhaps, serve a better pur¬ 
pose than any of them. 


Extent of Dunes in Europe. 

The dunes of Denmark, as we have seen, cover an area of 

two hundred and sixty square miles, or one hundred and 

sixty-six thousand acres; those of the Prussian coast are 

vaguely estimated at from eighty-five to one hundred and ten 

thousand acres; those of Holland at one hundred and forty 

thousand acres; * those of Gascony at about three hundred 

thousand acres.f I do not find any estimate of their extent in 

other provinces of France, in the duchies of Schleswig and 

Holstein, or in the Baltic provinces of Russia, but it is probable 

that the entire quantity of dune land upon the eastern shores 

of the Atlantic and the Baltic does not fall much short of a 

million of acres.:[ This vast deposit of sea sand extends along 

* 

* Andresen, Om Rlitformationen, pp. 78, 262, 275. 

t Laval, Memoire sur les Dunes du Oolfe de Gascogne, Annales des Ponts 
et Chaussees , 1847, 2me s6mestre, p. 261. 

1 There are extensive ranges of dunes on various parts of the coasts of 
the British Islands, but I find no estimate of their area. Pannewitz (An- 
leitung zum Anbau der Sandfldchen ), as cited by Andresen (Om Klitfor- 
mationen, p. 45), states that the drifting sands of Europe, including, of 
course, sand plains as well as dunes, cover an extent of 21,000 square miles. 
This is, perhaps, an exaggeration, though there is, undoubtedly, much more 
desert land of this description on the European continent than has been 
generally supposed. There is no question that most of this waste is capa¬ 
ble of reclamation by simple planting, and no mode of physical improve¬ 
ment is better worth the attention of civilized Governments than this. 

There are often serious objections to extensive forest planting on soils 
capable of being otherwise made productive, but they do not apply to sand 


508 


DUNE VINEYARDS OF CAR HR ETON. 


the coast for a distance of several hundred miles, and from the 
time of the destruction of the forests which covered it, to the 
year 1789, the whole line was rolling inward and burying the 
soil beneath it, or rendering the fields unproductive by the 
sand which drifted from it. At the same time, as the sand 
hills moved eastward, the ocean was closely following their 
retreat and swallowing up the ground they had covered, as 
fast as their movement left it bare. 

Planting the dunes has completely prevented the surface 
sands from blowing over the soil to the leeward of the planta¬ 
tions, and though it has not, in all cases, arrested the encroach¬ 
ments of the sea, it has so greatly retarded the rapidity of their 
advance, that sandy coasts, when once covered with forests, 
may be considered as substantially secure, so long as proper 
measures are taken for the protection of the woods. 

Dune Vineyards of Cap Breton . 

In the vicinity of Cap Breton in France, a peculiar process 
is successfully employed, both for preventing the drifting of 
dunes, and for rendering the sands themselves immediately 
productive ; but this method is applicable only in exceptional 
cases of favorable climate and exposure. It consists in plant¬ 
ing vineyards upon the dunes, and protecting them by hedges 
of broom, Erica scoparia , so disposed as to form rectangles 
about thirty feet by forty. The vines planted in these enclo¬ 
sures thrive admirably, and the grapes produced by them are 
among the best grown in France. The dunes are so far from 
being an unfavorable soil for the vine, that fresh sea-sand is 
regularly employed as a fertilizer for it, alternating every other 
season with ordinary manure. The quantity of sand thus ap¬ 
plied every second year, raises the surface of the vineyard 
about four or five inches. The vines are cut down every year 
to three or four shoots, and the raising of the soil rapidly cov- 

wastes, which, until covered by woods, are not only a useless incumbrance, 
but a source of serious danger to all human improvements in the neighbor¬ 
hood of them. 








REMOVAL OF DUNES—INLAND SAND PLAINS. 509 

ers the old stocks. As fast as buried, they send out new roots 
near the surface, and thus the vineyard is constantly renewed, 
and has always a youthful appearance, though it may have 
been already planted a couple of generations. This practice is 
ascertained to have been followed for two centuries, and is 
among the oldest well-authenticated attempts of man to resist 
and vanquish the dunes.* 

Removal of Dunes. 

The artificial removal of dunes, no longer necessary as a 
protection, does not appear to have been practised upon a large 
scale except in the Netherlands, where the numerous canals 
furnish an easy and economical means of transporting the 
sand, and where the construction and maintenance of sea and 
river dikes, and of causeways and other embankments and 
fillings, create a great demand for that material. Sand is also 
employed in Holland, in large quantities, for improving the 
consistence of the tough clay bordering upon or underlying 
diluvial deposits, and for forming an artificial soil for the 
growth of certain garden and ornamental vegetables. When 
the dunes are removed, the ground they covered is restored to 
the domain of industry; and the quantity of land, recovered 
in the Netherlands by the removal of the barren sands which 
encumbered it, amounts to hundreds and perhaps thousands of 
acres. 


Inland Sand Plains. 

The inland sand plains of Europe are either derived from 
the drifting of dunes or other beach sands, or consist of diluvial 
deposits. As we have seen, when once the interior of a dune 
is laid open to the wind, its contents are soon scattered far and 
wide over the adjacent country, and the beach sands, no longer 
checked by the rampart which nature had constrained them to 
build against their own encroachments, are also carried to con- 

* Boitel, Mise en raleur des Terres pauvres par le Pin maritime , pp. 
212 , 218 . 


510 


INLAND SANDS. 






siderable distances from the coast. Few regions have suffered 
so much from this cause in proportion to their extent, as the 
peninsula of Jutland. So long as the woods, with which nature 
had planted the Danish dunes, were spared, they seem to have 
heen stationary, and we have no historical evidence, of an earlier 
date than the sixteenth century, that they had become in any 
way injurious. From that period, there are frequent notices of 
the invasions of cultivated grounds by the sands; and excava¬ 
tions are constantly bringing to light proof of human habita¬ 
tion and of agricultural industry, in former ages, on soils now 
buried beneath deep drifts from the dunes and beaches of the 
sea coast.* 

Extensive tracts of valuable plain land in the Netherlands 
and in France have been covered in the same way with a layer 
of sand deep enough to render them infertile, and they can be 
restored to cultivation only by processes analogous to those 
employed for fixing and improving the dunes.f Diluvial sand 
plains, also, have been reclaimed by these methods in the 
Duchy of Austria, between Yienna and the Semmering ridge, 
in Jutland, and in the great champaign country of Northern 
Germany, especially the Mark Brandenburg, where artificial 
forests can be propagated with great ease, and where, conse¬ 
quently, this branch of industry has been pursued on a great 
scale, and with highly beneficial results, both as respects the 
supply of forest products and the preparation of the soil for 
agricultural use. 

As a general rule, inland sands are looser, dryer, and more 
inclined to drift, than those of the sea coast, where the moist 
and saline atmosphere of the ocean keeps them always more 
or less humid and cohesive. No shore dunes are so movable 
as the medanos of Peru described in a passage quoted from Pop- 



* For details, consult Andersen, Orn Klitformationen , pp. 223, 236. 
t When the deposit is not very deep, and the adjacent land lying to the 
leeward of the prevailing winds is covered with water, or otherwise worth¬ 
less, the surface is sometimes freed from the drifts by repeated harrowings, 
which loosen the sand, so that the wind takes it up and transports it to 
grounds where accumulations of it are less injurious. 



THE LANDES OF GASCONY. 


511 


pig on a former page, or as the sand hills of Poland, both of 
which seem better entitled to the appellation of sand waves than 
those of the Sahara or of the Arabian desert. The sands of 
the valley of the Lower Euphrates—themselves probably of 
submarine origin, and not derived from dunes—are advancing 
to the northwest with a rapidity which seems fabulous when 
compared with the slow movement of the sand hills of Gascony 
and the Low German coasts. Loftus, speaking of Niliyya, an 
old Arab town a few miles east of the ruins of Babylon, says 
that, “ in 1848, the sand began to accumulate around it, and in 
six years, the desert, within a radius of six miles, was covered 
with little, undulating domes, while the ruins of the city were 
so buried that it is now impossible to trace their original form 
or extent.” * Loftus considers this sand flood as the “ van¬ 
guard of those vast drifts which, advancing from the southeast, 
threaten eventually to overwhelm Babylon and Baghdad.” 

An observation of Layard, cited by Loftus, appears to me 
to furnish a possible explanation of this irruption. He “ passed 
two or three places where the sand, issuing from the earth 
like water, is called 6 Aioun-er-rummal,’ sand springs.” These 
“ springs ” are very probably merely the drifting of sand from 
the ancient subsoil, where the protecting crust of aquatic de¬ 
posit and vegetable earth has been broken through, as in the 
case of the drift which arose from the upturning of an oak 
mentioned on a former page. When the valley of the Eu¬ 
phrates was regularly irrigated and cultivated, the underlying 
sands were bound by moisture, alluvial slime, and vegetation ; 
but now, that all improvement is neglected, and the surface, no 
longer watered, has become parched, powdery, and naked, a 
mere accidental fissure in the superficial stratum may soon be 
enlarged to a wide opening, that will let loose sand enough to 
overwhelm a province. 

The Landes of Gascony . 

The most remarkable sand plain of France lies at the south¬ 
western extremity of the empire, and is generally known as 

* Travels and Researches in Chaldcea , chap. ix. 


512 


TITE LANDES. 


the Landes, or heaths, of Gascony. Clave thus describes it: 
“ Composed of pure sand, resting on an impermeable stratum 
called alios, the soil of the Landes was, for centuries, consid¬ 
ered incapable of cultivation. Parched in summer, drowned 
in winter, it produced only ferns, rushes, and heath, and 
scarcely furnished pasturage for a few half-starved flocks. To 
crown its miseries, this plain was continually threatened by the 
encroachments of the dunes. Vast ridges of sand, thrown up 
by the waves, for a distance of more than fifty leagues along 
the coast, and continually renewed, were driven inland by the 
west wind, and, as they rolled over the plain, they buried the 
soil and the hamlets, overcame all resistance, and advanced 
with fearful regularity. The whole province seemed devoted 
to certain destruction, when Bremontier invented his method 
of fixing the dunes by plantations of the maritime pine.” * 
Although the Landes had been almost abandoned for ages, 
they show numerous traces of ancient cultivation and prosper¬ 
ity, and it is principally by means of the encroachments of the 
sands that they have become reduced to their present desolate 
condition. The destruction of the coast towns and harbors, 
which furnished markets for the products of the plains, the dam¬ 
ming up of the rivers, and the obstruction of the smaller chan¬ 
nels of natural drainage by the advance of the dunes, were no 
doubt very influential causes; and if we add the drifting of 
the sea sand over the soil, we have at least a partial explanation 
of the decayed agriculture and diminished population of this 
great waste. When the dunes were once arrested, and the 
soil to the east of them was felt to be secure against invasion 
by them, experiments, in the way of agricultural improvement, 
by drainage and plantation, were commenced, and they have 
been attended with such signal success, that the complete re¬ 
covery of one of the dreariest and most extensive wastes in 
Europe may be considered as both a probable and a near 
event, f 

* Etudes Fores tieres, p. 253. 

t Lavergne, Economic Rurale de la France , p. 300, estimates the area 
of the Landes of Gascony at 700,000 hoctares, or about 1,700,000 acres. 














THE BELGIAN CAMPINE-SANDS OF EASTERN EUROPE. 513 


The Belgian Campine. 

In the northern part of Belgium, and extending across the 
confines of Holland, is another very similar heath plain, called 
the Campine. This is a vast sand flat, interspersed with 
marshes and inland dunes, and, until recently, considered 
wholly incapable of cultivation. Enormous sums have been 
expended in reclaiming it by draining and other familiar 
agricultural processes, but without results at all proportional 
to the capital invested. In 1849, the unimproved portion of 
the Campine was estimated at little less than three hundred 
and fifty thousand acres. The example of France has prompt¬ 
ed experiments in the planting of trees, especially the maritime 
pine, upon this barren waste, and the results have been such 
as to show that its sands may both be fixed and made produc¬ 
tive, not only without loss, but with positive pecuniary ad¬ 
vantage.* 


Sands and Steppes of Eastern Europe. 

There are still unsubdued sand wastes in many parts of in¬ 
terior Europe not familiarly known to tourists or even geo¬ 
graphers. “ Olkuez and Schiewier in Poland,” says Naumann, 

The same author states (p. 304), that when the Moors were driven from 
Spain by the blind cupidity and brutal intolerance of the age, they de¬ 
manded permission to establish themselves in this desert; but political 
and religious prejudices prevented the granting of this liberty. At this 
period the Moors were a far more cultivated people than their Christian 
persecutors, and they had carried many arts, that of agriculture especially, 
to a higher pitch than any other European nation. But France was not 
wise enough to accept what Spain had cast out, and the Landes remained 
a waste for three centuries longer. 

The forest of Fontainebleau, which contains above 40,000 acres, is not 
a plain, but its soil is composed almost wholly of sand, interspersed with 
ledges of rock. The saud forms not less than ninety-eight per cent, of the 
earth, and, as it is almost without water, it would be a drifting desert but 
for the artificial propagation of forest trees upon it. 

* Rconomie Rurale de la Belgique, 'par Emile de Lavelete, Revue des 
Deux Monde », Juin, 1861, pp. 617-644. 

33 


i 


514 


STEPPES OF RUSSIA. 


“ lie in true sand deserts, and a boundless plain of sand stretches 
around Ozenstockau, on which there grows neither tree nor 
shrub. In heavy winds, this plain resembles a rolling sea, and 
the sand hills rise and disappear like the waves of the ocean. 
The heaps of waste from the Olkucz mines are covered with 
sand to the depth of four fathoms.” * No attempts have yet 
been made to subdue the sands of Poland, but when peace and 
prosperity shall be restored to that unhappy country, there is 
no reasonable doubt that the measures, which have proved so 
successful on similar formations in Germany, may be employed 
with advantage in the Polish deserts. 

There are sand drifts in parts of the steppes of Russia, but 
in general the soil of those vast plains is of a different, though 
very varied, composition, and is covered with vegetation. The 
steppes, however, have many points of analogy with the sand 
plains of Northern Germany, and if they are ever fitted for 
civilized occupation, it must be by the same means, that is, by 
planting forests. It is disputed whether the steppes were ever 
wooded. They were certainly bare of forest growth at a very 
remote period; for Herodotus describes the country of the 
Scythians between the Ister and the Tanais as woodless, with 
the exception of the small province of Xylsea between the 
Dnieper and the Gulf of Perekop. They are known to have 
been occupied by a large nomade and pastoral population down 
to the sixteenth century, though these tribes are now much re¬ 
duced in numbers. The habits of such races are scarcely less 
destructive to the forest than those of civilized life. Pastoral 
tribes do not employ much wood for fuel or for constructing, 
but they carelessly or recklessly burn down the forests, and 
their cattle effectually check the growth of young trees wher¬ 
ever their range extends. 

At present, the furious winds which sweep over the plains, 
the droughts of summer, and the rights and abuses of pasturage, 
constitute very formidable obstacles to the employment of 
measures which have been attended with so valuable results on 
the sand wastes of France and Germany. The Russian Gov- 

* Geognosic , ii, p. 1173. 



BENEFITS OF PLANTING. 


515 


eminent lias, however, attempted the wooding of the steppes, and 
there are thriving plantations in the neighborhood of Odessa, 
where the soil is of a particularly loose and sandy character.* 
The trees best suited to this locality, and, as there is good rea¬ 
son to suppose, to sand plains in general, is the Ailanthus 
glandulosa , or Japan varnish tree.f The remarkable success 
which has crowned the experiments with the ailanthus at 
Odessa, will, no doubt, stimulate to similar trials elsewhere, 
and it seems not improbable that the arundo and the maritime 
pine, which have fixed so many thousand acres of drifting 
sands in Western Europe, will be, partially at least, superseded 
by the tamarisk and the varnish tree. 


Advantages of Reclaiming the Sands. 

If we consider the quantity of waste land which has been 
made productive by the planting of the sand hills and plains, 
and the extent of fertile soil, the number of villages and other 
human improvements, and the value of the harbors, which the 
same process has saved from being buried under the rolling 
dunes, and at last swallowed up forever by the invasions of the 
sea, we shall be inclined to rank Bremontier and Beventlov 
among the greatest benefactors of their race. "W ith the excep- 


* According to Hohenstein, Der Wald , pp. 228, 229, an extensive plan¬ 
tation of pines—a tree new to Southern Russia—was commenced in 1842, 
on the barren and sandy banks of the Ingula, near Elisahethgrod, and has 
met with very flattering success. Other experiments in sylviculture at dif¬ 
ferent points on the steppes promise valuable results. 

f “ Sixteen years ago,” says an Odessa landholder, “ I attempted to fix 
the sand of the steppes, which covers the rocky ground to the depth of a 
foot, and forms moving hillocks with every change of wind. I tried 
acacias and pines in vain ; nothing would grow in such a soil. At length 
r planted the varnish tree, or ailanthus , which succeeded completely in 
vinding the sand.” This result encouraged the proprietor to extend his 
plantations over both dunes and sand steppes, and in the course of sixteen 
years this rapidly growing tree had formed real forests. Other landowners 
have imitated his example with great advantage.— Rentsch, Der Wald , p. 

44, 45. 


516 


GOVERNMENT WORKS. 


tion of the dikes of the Netherlands, their labors are the first 
deliberate and direct attempts of man to make himself, on a 
great scale, a geographical power, to restore natural balances 
which earlier generations had disturbed, and to atone, by acts 
guided by foreseeing and settled purpose, for the waste which 
thoughtless improvidence had created. 

1 

Government Works. 

There is an important political difference between these lat¬ 
ter works and the diking system of the Netherlandish and 
German coasts. The dikes originally were, and in modern 
times very generally have been, private enterprises, undertaken 
with no other aim than to add a certain quantity of cultivable 
soil to the former possessions of their proprietor, or sometimes 
of the state. In short, with few exceptions, they have been 
merely a pecuniary investment, a mode of acquiring land not 
economically different from purchase. The planting of the 
dunes, on the contrary, has always been a public work, executed^ 
not with the expectation of reaping a regular direct percentage 
of income from the expenditure, but dictated by higher views 
of state economy—by the same governmental principles, in 
fact, which animate all commonwealths in repelling invasion 
by hostile armies, or in repairing the damages that invading 
forces may have inflicted on the general interests of the people. 
The restoration of the forests in the southern part of France, 
as now conducted by the Government of that empire, is a 
measure of the same elevated character as the fixing of the 
dunes. In former ages, forests were formed or protected sim¬ 
ply for the sake of the shelter they afforded to game, or for 
the timber they yielded ; but the recent legislation of France, 
and of some other Continental countries, on this subject, looks 
to more distant as well as nobler ends, and these are among 1 
the public acts which most strongly encourage the hope that 
the rulers of Christendom are coming better to understand the 
true duties and interests of civilized government. 


CHAPTER VI. 


PROJECTED OR POSSIBLE GEOGRAPHICAL CHANGES BY MAN. 


CUTTING OF MARINE ISTHMUSES—THE SUEZ CANAL—CANAL ACROSS ISTHMUS 

OF DARIEN—CANALS TO THE DEAD SEA—MARITIME CANALS IN GREECE- 

CANAL OF SAROS—CAPE COD CANAL—DIVERSION OF THE NILE—CHANGES 
IN THE CASPIAN—IMPROVEMENTS IN NORTH AMERICAN HYDROGRAPHY—DI¬ 
VERSION OF RHINE—DRAINING OF THE ZUIDERZEE—WATERS OF THE KARST 

-SUBTERRANEAN WATERS OF GREECE—SOIL BELOW ROCK—COVERING ROCKS 

WITH EARTH-WADIES OF ARABIA PKTR.1EA-INCIDENTAL EFFECTS OF HUMAN 

ACTION-RESISTANCE TO GREAT NATURAL FORCES—EFFECTS OF MINING- 

ESPY’S THEORIES—RIYER SEDIMENT—NOTHING SMALL IN NATURE. 


Cutting of Marine Isthmuses. 

Besides the great enterprises of physical transformation ot 
which I have already spoken, other works of internal improve¬ 
ment or change have been projected in ancient and modern 
times, the execution of which would produce considerable, and, 
in some cases, extremely important, revolutions in the face of 
the earth. Some of the schemes to which I refer are evidently 
chimerical; others are difficult, indeed, but cannot be said to 
be impracticable, though discouraged by the apprehension of 
disastrous consequences from the disturbance of existing natu¬ 
ral or artificial arrangements ; and there are still others, the 
accomplishment of which is ultimately certain, though for the 
present forbidden by economical considerations. 

When we consider the number of narrow necks or isthmuses 
which separate gulfs and bays of the sea from each other, or 
froln the main ocean, and take into account the time and cost, 


518 


CUTTING- OF ISTHMUSES. 


and risks of navigation which would be saved by executing 
channels to connect such waters, and thus avoiding the neces¬ 
sity of doubling long capes and promontories, or even conti¬ 
nents, it seems strange that more of the enterprise and money 
which have been so lavishly expended in forming artificial 
rivers for internal navigation should not have been bestowed 
upon the construction of maritime canals. Many such have 
been projected in early and in recent ages, and some trifling 
cuts between marine waters have been actually made, but no 
work of this sort, possessing real geographical or even commer¬ 
cial importance, has yet been effected. 

These enterprises are attended with difficulties and open to 
objections, which are not, at first sight, obvious. Nature 
guards well the chains by which she connects promontories 
with mainlands, and binds continents together. Isthmuses are 
usually composed of adamantine rock or of shifting sands— 
the latter being much the more refractory material to deal 
with. In all such works there is a necessity for deep excava¬ 
tion below low-water mark—always a matter of great difficulty ; 
the dimensions of channels for sea-going ships must be much 
greater than those of canals of inland navigation; the height 
of the masts or smoke pipes of that class of vessels would 
often render bridging impossible, and thus a ship canal might 
obstruct a communication more important than that which it 
was intended to promote; the securing of the entrances of 
marine canals and the construction of ports at their termini 
would in general be difficult and expensive, and the harbors 
and the channel which connected them would be extremely 
liable to fill up by deposits washed in from sea and shore. 
Besides all this, there is, in many cases, an alarming uncer¬ 
tainty as to the effects of joining together waters which nature 
has put asunder. A new channel may deflect strong currents 
from safe courses, and thus occasion destructive erosion of shores 
otherwise secure, or promote the transportation of sand or slime 
to block up important harbors, or it may furnish a powerful 
enemy with dangerous facilities for hostile operations along the 
coast. 







T1IE SUEZ CANAL. 


519 


Nature sometimes mocks the cunning and the power of man 
by spontaneously performing, for his benefit, works which he 
shrinks from undertaking, and the execution of which by him 
she would resist with unconquerable obstinacy. A dangerous 
sand bank, that all the enginery of the world could not dredge 
out in a generation, may be carried off in a night by a strong 
river flood, or a current impelled by a violent wind from an 
unusual quarter, and a passage scarcely navigable by fishing 
boats may be thus converted into a commodious channel for 
the largest ship that floats upon the ocean. In the remarkable 
gulf of Liimfjord in Jutland, nature has given a singular ex¬ 
ample of a canal which she alternately opens as a marine strait, 
and, by shutting again, converts into a fresh-water lagoon. 
The Liimfjord was doubtless originally an open channel from 
the Atlantic to the Baltic between two islands, but the sand 
washed up by the sea blocked up the western entrance, and 
built a wall of dunes to close it more firmly. This natural 
dike, as we have seen, has been more than once broken through, 
and it is perhaps in the power of man, either permanently to 
maintain the barrier, or to remove it and keep a navigable 
channel constantly open. If the Liimfjord becomes an open 
strait, the washing of sea sand through it would perhaps block 
up some of the belts and small channels now important for the 
navigation of the Baltic, and the direct introduction of a tidal 

<D ' 

current might produce very perceptible effects on the hydro¬ 
graphy of the Cattegat. 

Tlie Suez Canal. 

If the Suez Canal—the greatest and most truly cosmopolite 
physical improvement ever undertaken by man—shall prove 
successful, it will considerably affect the basins of the Mediter¬ 
ranean and of the Bed Sea, though in a different manner, and 
probably in a less degree than the diversion of the current of the 
Nile from the one to the other—to which I shall presently re¬ 
fer _would do. It. is, indeed, conceivable, that if a free chan¬ 

nel be once cut from sea to sea, the coincidence of a high tide 
and a heavy south wind might produce a hydraulic force 


520 


THE SUEZ CANAL. 


that would convert the narrow canal into an open strait. In 
such a case, it is impossible to estimate, or even to foresee, the 
consequences which might result from the unobstructed ming¬ 
ling of the flowing and ebbing currents of the Red Sea with 
the almost tideless waters of the Mediterranean. There can be 
no doubt, however, that they would be of a most important 
character as respects the simply geographical features and the 
organic life of both. But the shallowness of the two seas at 
the termini of the canal, the action of the tides of the one and 
the currents of the other, and the nature of the intervening isth¬ 
muses, render the occurrence of such a cataclysm in the highest 
degree improbable. The obstruction of the canal by sea sand 
at both ends is a danger far more difficult to guard against and 
avert, than an irruption of the waters of either sea. 

There is, then, no reason to expect any change of coast 
lines or of natural navigable channels as a direct consequence 
of the opening of the Suez Canal, but it will, no doubt, produce 
very interesting revolutions in the animal and vegetable popu¬ 
lation of both basins. The Mediterranean, with some local 
exceptions—such as the bays of Calabria, and the coast of 
Sicily so picturesquely described by Quatrefages*—is com¬ 
paratively poor in marine vegetation, and in shell as w r ell as 
in fin fish. The scarcity of fish in some of its gulfs is prover¬ 
bial, and you may scrutinize long stretches of beach on its 
northern shores, after every south wind for a whole winter, 
without finding a dozen shells to reward your search. But no 
one who has not looked down into tropical or subtropical seas 
can conceive the amazing wealth of the Red Sea in organic 
life. Its bottom is carpeted or paved with marine plants, with 
zoophytes and with shells, while its waters are teeming with 
infinitely varied forms of moving life. Most of its vegetables 
and its animals, no doubt, are confined by the laws of their or¬ 
ganization to warmer temperatures than that of the Mediter¬ 
ranean, but among them there must be many, whose habitat 
is of a wider range, many whose powers of accommodation 
would enable them to acclimate themselves in a colder sea. 

* Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste, i, pp. 204 et seqq. 


THE SUEZ CANAL. 


521 


We may suppose tlie less numerous aquatic fauna and flora 
of the Mediterranean to be equally capable of climatic adapta¬ 
tion, and hence, when the canal shall be opened, there will be 
an interchange of the organic population not already common 
to both seas. Destructive species, thus newly introduced, may 
diminish the numbers of their proper prey in either basin, and, 
on the other hand, the increased supply of appropriate food 
may greatly multiply the abundance of others, and at the same 
time add important contributions to the aliment of man in the 
countries bordering on the Mediterranean. 

A collateral feature of this great project deserves notice as 
possessing no inconsiderable geographical importance. I refer 
to the conduit or conduits constructed from the Nile to the 
isthmus, primarily to supply fresh water to the laborers on the 
great canal, and ultimately to serve as aqueducts for the city 
of Suez, and for the irrigation and reclamation of a large ex¬ 
tent of desert soil. In the flourishing days of the Egyptian 
empire, the waters of the Nile were carried over important 
districts east of the river. In later ages, most of this territory 
relapsed into a desert, from the decay of the canals which 
once fertilized it. There is no difficulty in restoring the ancient 
channels, or in constructing new, and thus watering not only 
all the soil that the wisdom of the Pharaohs had improved, but 
much additional land. Hundreds of square miles of arid sand 
waste would thus be converted into fields of perennial verdure, 
and the geography of Lower Egypt would be thereby sensibly 
changed. If the canal succeeds, considerable towns will grow 
up at once at both ends of the channel, and at intermediate 
points, all depending on the maintenance of aqueducts from 
the Nile, both for water and for the irrigation of the neigh¬ 
boring fields which are to supply them with bread. Important 
interests will thus be created, which will secure the permanence 
of the hydraulic works and of the geographical changes pro¬ 
duced by them, and Suez, or Port Said, or the city at Lake 
Timsah, may become the capital of the government which has 
been so long established at Cairo. 


522 


CANAL ACROSS THE ISTHMUS OF DARIEN. 


Canal across the Isthmus of Darien . 



The most colossal project of canalization ever suggested, 
whether we consider the physical difficulties of its execution, 
the magnitude and importance of the waters proposed to he 
united, or the distance which would be saved in navigation, is 
that of a channel between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, 
across the Isthmus of Darien. I do not now speak of a lock 
canal, by way of the Lake of Nicaragua or any other route—• 
for such a work would not differ essentially from other canals, 
and would scarcely possess a geographical character—but of an 
open cut between the two seas. It has been by no means shown 
that the construction of such a channel is possible, and, if it 
were opened, it is highly probable that sand bars would accu¬ 
mulate at both entrances, so as to obstruct any powerful cur¬ 
rent through it. But if we suppose the work to be actually 
accomplished, there would be, in the first place, such a mixture 
of the animal and vegetable life of the two great oceans as I 
have stated to be likely to result from the opening of the Suez 
Canal between two much smaller basins. In the next place, 
if the channel were not obstructed by sand bars, it might sooner 
or later be greatly widened and deepened by the mechanical 
action of the current through it, and consequences, not inferior 
in magnitude to any physical revolution which has taken place 
since man appeared upon the earth, might result from it. 

What those consequences would be is in a great degree 
matter of pure conjecture, and there is much room for the ex¬ 
ercise of the imagination on the subject; but, as more than one 
geographer has suggested, there is one possible result which 
throws all other conceivable effects of such a work quite into the 
shade. I refer to changes in the course of the two great oceanic 
rivers, the Gulf Stream and the corresponding current on the 
Pacific side of the isthmus. The warm waters which the Gulf 
Stream transports to high latitudes and then spreads out, like 
an expanded hand, along the eastern shores of the Atlantic, 
give out, as they cool, heat enough to raise the mean tempera¬ 
ture of Western Europe several degrees. In fact, the Gulf 








CANAL ACROSS THE ISTHMUS OF DARIEN. 


523 


Stream is the principal cause of the superiority of the climate 
of Western Europe over those of Eastern America and Eastern 
Asia in the corresponding latitudes. All the meteorological 
conditions of the former region are in a great measure regulated 
by it, and hence it is the grandest and most beneficent of all 
purely geographical phenomena. We do not yet know enough 
of the laws which govern the movements of this mighty flood 
of warmth and life to be able to say whether its current would 
be perceptibly affected by the severance of the Isthmus of 
Darien ; but as it enters and sweeps round the Gulf of Mexico, 
it is possible that the removal of the resistance of the land 
which forms the western shore of that sea, might allow the 
stream to maintain its original westward direction, and join 
itself to the tropical current of the Pacific. 

The effect of such a change would he an immediate depres¬ 
sion of the mean temperature of Western Europe to the level 
of that of Eastern America, and perhaps the climate of the 
former continent might become as excessive as that of the 
latter, or even a new “ice period” be occasioned hy the with¬ 
drawal of so important a source of warmth from the northern 
zones. Hence would result the extinction of vast multitudes 
of land and sea plants and animals, and a total revolution in 
the domestic and rural economy of human life in all those 
countries from which the Hew World has received its civilized 
population. Other scarcely less startling consequences may be 
imagined as possible ; but the whole speculation is too dreary, 
distant, and improbable to deserve to be long indulged in.* 

* “ If we suppose the narrow isthmus of Central America to be sunk in 
the ocean, the warm equatorial current would no longer follow its circuitous 
route around the Gulf of Mexico, but pour itself through the new opening 
directly into the Pacific. We should then lose the warmth of the Gulf 
Stream, and cold polar currents flowing farther southward would take its 
place and be driven upon our coasts by the western winds. The North 
Sea would resemble Hudson’s Bay, and its harbors be free from ice at best 
only in summer. The power and prosperity of its coasts would shrivel under 
the breath of winter, as a medusa thrown on shore shrinks to an insig¬ 
nificant film under the influence of the destructive atmosphere. Com¬ 
merce, industry, fertility of soil, population, would disappear, and the vast 


524 


CANALS TO THE DEAD SEA. 


Canals to the Dead Sea. 

The project of Captain Allen for opening a new route to 
India by cuts between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, 
and between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea, presents many 
interesting considerations.* The hypsometrical observations 
of Bertou, Roth, and others, render it highly probable, if 
not certain, that the watershed in the Wadi-el-Araba between 
the Dead Sea and the Red Sea is not less than three hundred 
feet above the mean level of the latter, and if this is so, the 
execution of a canal from the one sea to the other is quite out 
of the question. But the summit level between the Mediter¬ 
ranean and the Jordan, near Jezreel, is believed to be little, if 
at all, more than one hundred feet above the sea, and the dis¬ 
tance is so short that the cutting of a channel through the 
dividing ridge would probably be found by no means an im¬ 
practicable undertaking. Although, therefore, we have no 
reason to believe it possible to open a navigable channel to the 
east by way of the Dead Sea, there is not much doubt that the 
basin of the latter might be made accessible from the Mediter¬ 
ranean. 

The level of the Dead Sea lies 1,316.7 feet below that of 
the ocean. It is bounded east and west by mountain ridges, 
rising to the height of from 2,000 to 4,000 feet above the 
ocean. From its southern end, a depression called the Wadi- 
el-Araba extends to the Gulf of Akaba, the eastern arm of the 
Red Sea. The Jordan empties into its northern extremity, 
after having passed through the Lake of Tiberias at an eleva¬ 
tion of 663.4 feet above the Dead Sea, or 653.3 below the Med¬ 
iterranean, and drains a considerable valley north of the lake, 
as well as the plain of Jericho, which lies between the lake 
and the sea. If the waters of the Mediterranean were admitted 

waste—a new Labrador—would become a worthless appendage of some 
clime more favored by nature.”— Haetwig, Das Leben cles Meeres , p. 70. 

* I know nothing of Captain Allen’s work but its title and its subject. 
Very probably he may have anticipated many of the following speculations, 
and thrown light on points upon which I am ignorant. 







CANALS TO THE DEAD SEA. 


525 


freely into the basin ot the Dead Sea, they would raise its sur¬ 
face to the general level oi the ocean, and consequently flood 
all the dry land below that level within the basin. 

I do not know that accurate levels have been taken in the 
valley of the Jordan above the Lake of Tiberias, and our infor¬ 
mation is very vague as to the hypsometry of the northern 
part of the Wadi-el-Araba. As little do we know where a 
contour line, carried around the basin at the level of the Medi¬ 
terranean, would strike its eastern and western borders. We 
cannot, therefore, accurately compute the extent of now dry 
land which would he covered by the admission of the waters 
of the Mediterranean, or the area of the inland sea which 
would he thus created. Its length, however, would certainly 
exceed one hundred and fifty miles, and its mean breadth, in¬ 
cluding its gulfs and bays, could scarcely be less than fifteen, 
perhaps even twenty. It would cover very little ground now 
occupied by civilized or even uncivilized man, though some of 
the soil which would be submerged—for instance, that watered 
by the Fountain of Elisha and other neighboring sources—is of 
great fertility, and, under a wiser government and better civil 
institutions, might rise to importance, because, from its depres¬ 
sion, it possesses a very warm climate, and might supply South¬ 
eastern Europe with tropical products more readily than they 
can be obtained from any other source. Such a canal and sea 
would be of no present commercial importance, because they 
would give access to no new markets or sources of supply; but 
when the fertile valleys and the deserted plains east of the 
Jordan shall be reclaimed to agriculture and civilization, these 
waters would furnish a channel of communication which might 
become the medium of a very extensive trade. 

Whatever might be the economical results of the opening 
and filling of the Dead Sea basin, the creation of a new evap- 
orable area, adding not less than 2,000 or perhaps 3,000 square 
miles to the present fluid surface of Syria, could not fail to 
produce important meteorological effects. The climate of 
Syria would be tempered, its precipitation and its fertility in¬ 
creased, the courses of its winds and the electrical condition 


520 


CANAL ACEOSS ISTHMUS OF COEINTH. 


of its atmosphere modified. The present organic life of the 
valley would be extinguished, and many tribes of plants 
and animals would emigrate from the Mediterranean to the 
new home which human art had prepared for them. It is 
possible, too, that the addition of 1,300 feet, or forty atmo¬ 
spheres, of hydrostatic pressure upon the bottom of the basin 
might disturb the equilibrium between the internal and the 
external forces of the crust of the earth at this point of abnor¬ 
mal configuration, and thus produce geological convulsions the 
intensity of which cannot be even conjectured. 

Maritime Canals in Greece. 

A maritime canal executed and another projected in an¬ 
cient times, the latter of which is again beginning to excite 
attention, deserve some notice, though their importance is of a 
commercial rather than a geographical character. The first 
of these is the cut made by Xerxes through the rock which 
connects the promontory of Mount Athos with the mainland ; 
the other, a navigable canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. 
In spite of the testimony of Herodotus and Thucydides, the 
Romans classed the catial of Xerxes among the fables of “ men¬ 
dacious Greece,” and yet traces of it are perfectly distinct at 
the present day through its whole extent, except at a single 
point where, after it had become so choked as to be no longer 
navigable, it was probably filled up to facilitate communica¬ 
tion by land between the promontory and the country in the 
rear of it. 

If the fancy kingdom of Greece shall ever become a sober 
reality, escape from its tutelage and acquire such a moral as 
well as political status that its own capitalists—who now pre¬ 
fer to establish themselves and employ their funds anywhere 
else rather than in their native land—have any confidence in 
the permanency of its institutions, a navigable channel will no 
doubt be opened between the gulfs of Lepanto and iEgina. 
The annexation of the Ionian Islands to Greece will make such 
a work almost a political necessity, and it would not only fur- 






CANAL OF GALLIPOLI. 


527 


nish valuable facilities for domestic intercourse, but become an 
important channel of communication between the Levant and 
the countries bordering on the Adriatic, or conducting their 
trade through that sea. 

As I have said, the importance of this latter canal and of a 
na\ igable channel between Mount Athos and the continent 
would be chiefly commercial, but both of them would be con¬ 
spicuous instances of the control of man over nature in a field 
where he has thus far done little to interfere with her sponta¬ 
neous arrangements. If they were constructed upon such a 
scale as to admit of the free passage of the water through 
them, in either direction, as the prevailing wdnds should impel 
it, they would exercise a certain influence on the coast cur¬ 
rents, which are important as hydrographical elements, and 
also as producing abrasion of the coast and a drift at the bot¬ 
tom of seas, and hence would be entitled to a higher rank than 
simply as artificial means of transit. 

Canal of Saros. 

It has been thought practicable to cut a canal across the 
peninsula of Gallipoli from the outlet of the Sea of Marmora 
into the Gulf of Saros. It may be doubted whether the mechan¬ 
ical difficulties of such a work would not be found insuperable; 
but when Constantinople shall recover the important political 
and commercial rank which naturally belongs to her, the exe¬ 
cution of such a canal will be recommended by strong reasons 
of military expediency, as well as by the interests of trade. 
An open channel across the peninsula would divert a portion 
of the water which now flows through the Dardanelles, dimin¬ 
ish.the rapidity of that powerful current, and thus in part re¬ 
move the difficulties which obstruct the navigation of the 
strait. It would considerably abridge the distance by water 
between Constantinople and tlie northern coast of the Aegean, 
and it wmuld have the important advantage of obliging an 
enemy to maintain two blockading fleets instead of one. 


528 


DIVERSION OF THE NILE. 


Cajpe Cod Canal. 

The opening of a navigable cut through the narrow neck 
which separates the southern part of Cape Cod Bay in Massa¬ 
chusetts from the Atlantic, was long ago suggested, and there 
are few coast improvements on the Atlantic shores of the United 
States which are recommended by higher considerations of 
utility. It would save the most important coasting trade of 
the United States the long and dangerous navigation around 
Cape Cod, afford a new and safer entrance to Boston harbor 
for vessels from Southern j>orts, secure a choice of passages, 
thus permitting arrivals upon the coast and departures from it 
at periods when wind and weather might otherwise prevent 
them, and furnish a most valuable internal communication in 
case of coast blockade by a foreign power. The difficulties of 
the undertaking are no doubt formidable, but the expense of 
maintenance and the uncertainty of the effects of currents set¬ 
ting through the new strait are still more serious objections. 

Diversion of the Nile. 

Perhaps the most remarkable project of great physical 
change, proposed or threatened in earlier ages, is that of the 
diversion of the Rile from its natural channel, and the turning 
of its current into either the Libyan desert or the Red Sea. 
The Ethiopian or Abyssinian princes more than once menaced 
the Memlouk sultans with the execution of this alarming pro¬ 
ject, and the fear of so serious an evil is said to have induced 
the Moslems to conciliate the Abyssinian kings by large pres¬ 
ents, and by some concessions to the oppressed Christians of 
Egypt,* Indeed, Arabic historians affirm than it in the tenth 

* “ Some haue writte, that by certain kings inhabiting aboue, the Nilus 
should there be stopped; & at a time prefixt, let loose vpon a certaine 
tribute payd them by the Aegyptians. The error springing perhaps fro a 
truth (as all wandring reports for the most part doe) in that the Sultan 
doth pay a certaine annuall summe to the Abissin Emperour for not diuert- 
ing the course of the Kiuer, which (they say) he may, or impouerish it at 
the least,”— George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey, etc., p. 98. 



DIVERSION OF THE NILE. 


529 


century the Ethiopians dammed the river, and, for a whole 
year, cut off its waters from Egypt. The probable explana¬ 
tion of this story is to be found in a season of extreme drought, 
such as have sometimes occurred in the valley of the Nile. 
About the beginning of the sixteenth century, Albuquerque 
the “ Terrible ” revived the scheme of turning the Nile into 
the Red Sea, with the hope of destroying the transit trade 
through Egypt by way of Kosseir. In 1525 the King of Por¬ 
tugal was requested by the Emperor of Abyssinia to send him 
engineers for that purpose ; a successor of that prince threat¬ 
ened to attempt the project about the year 1700, and even as 
late as the French occupation of Egypt, the possibility of 
driving out the intruder by this means was suggested in 
England. 

It cannot be positively affirmed that the diversion of the 
waters of the Nile to the Red Sea is impossible. In the chain 
of mountains which separates the two valleys, Brown found a 
deep depression or wadi, extending from the one to the other, 
at no great elevation above the bed of the river. The Libyan 
desert is so much higher than the Nile below the junction of 
the two principal branches at Khartum, that there is no rea¬ 
son to believe a new channel for their united waters could be 
found in that direction ; but the Bahr-el-Abiad flows through, 
if it does not rise in, a great table land, and some of its tribu¬ 
taries are supposed to communicate in the rainy season with 
branches of great rivers flowing in quite another direction. 
Hence it is probable that a portion at least of the waters of 
this great arm of the Nile—and perhaps a quantity the ab¬ 
straction of which would be sensibly felt in Egypt—might be 
sent to the Atlantic by the Niger, lost in the inland lakes of 
Central Africa, or employed to fertilize the Libyan sand 
wastes. 

Admitting the possibility of turning the whole river into 
the Red Sea, let us consider the probable effect of the change. 
First and most obvious is the total destruction of the fertility 
of Middle and Lower Egypt, the conversion of that part of the 
valley into a desert, and the extinction of its imperfect civiliza- 
34 


530 


DIVERSION OF THE NILE. 


tion, if not the absolute extirpation of its inhabitants. This is 
the calamity threatened by the Abyssinian princes and the fe¬ 
rocious Portuguese warrior, and feared by the sultans of Egypt. 
Beyond these immediate and palpable consequences neither 
party then looked ; but a far wider geographical area, and far 
more extensive and various human interests, would be affected 
by the measure. The spread of the Nile during the annual in¬ 
undation covers, for many weeks, several thousand square 
miles with water, and at other seasons of the year pervades 
the same and even a larger area with moisture by infiltration. 
The abstraction of so large an evaporable surface from the 
southern shores of the Mediterranean could not but produce 
important effects on many meteorological phenomena, and the 
humidity, the temperature, the electrical condition and the at¬ 
mospheric currents of Northeastern Africa might be modified 
to a degree that would sensibly affect the climate of Europe. 

The Mediterranean, deprived of the contributions of the 
Nile, would require a larger supply, and of course a stronger 
current, of water from the Atlantic through the Straits of Gi¬ 
braltar' ; the proportion of salt it contains would be increased, 
and the animal life of at least its southern borders would be 
consequently modified; the current which winds along its 
southern, eastern, and northeastern shores would be dimin¬ 
ished in force and volume, if not destroyed altogether, and its 
basin and its harbors would be shoaled by no new deposits 
from the highlands of inner Africa. 

In the much smaller Ped Sea, more immediately percept¬ 
ible, if not greater, effects, would be produced. The deposits 
of slime would reduce its depth, and perhaps, in the course of 
ages, divide it into an inland and an open sea ; its waters 
would be more or less freshened, and its immensely rich ma¬ 
rine fauna and flora changed in character and proportion, and, 
near the mouth of the river, perhaps even destroyed altogether ; 
its navigable channels would be altered in position and often 
quite obstructed; the flow of its tides would be modified by 
the new geographical conditions; the sediment of the river 
would form new coast lines and lowlands, which would be 







CHANGES IN THE CASPIAN. 


531 


covered with vegetation, and probably thereby produce sensible 
climatic changes. 

Changes in the Caspian. 

The Russian Government has contemplated the establish¬ 
ment of a nearly direct water communication between the Cas¬ 
pian Sea and the Sea of Azoff, partly by natural and partly by 
artificial channels, and there are now navigable canals between 
the Don and the Volga ; but these works, though not wanting 
in commercial and political interest, do not possess any geo¬ 
graphical importance. It is, however, very possible to pro¬ 
duce appreciable geographical changes in the basin of the Cas¬ 
pian by the diversion of the great rivers which flow from Cen¬ 
tral Russia. The surface of the Caspian is eighty-three feet 
below the level of the Sea of Azoff, and its depression has been 
explained upon the hypothesis that the evaporation exceeds 
the supply derived, directly and indirectly, from precipitation, 
though able physicists now maintain that the sinking of this 
sea is due to a subsidence of its bottom from geological causes. 
At Tsaritsin, the Don, which empties into the Sea of Azoff, 
and the Volga, which pours into the Caspian, approach each 
other within ten miles. Rear this point, by means of open or 
subterranean canals, the Don might be turned into the Volga, 
or the Volga into the Don. If we suppose the whole or a 
large proportion of the waters of the Don to be thus diverted 
from their natural outlet and sent down to the Caspian, the 
equilibrium between the evaporation from that sea and its 
supply of water might be restored, or its level even raised 
above its ancient limits. If the Volga were turned into the 
Sea of Azoff, the Caspian would be reduced in dimensions 
until the balance between loss and gain should be reestab¬ 
lished, and it would occupy a much smaller area than at pres¬ 
ent. Such changes in the proportion of solid and fluid surface 
would have some climatic effects in the territory which drains 
into the Caspian, and on the other hand, the introduction of a 
greater quantity of fresh water into the Sea of Azoff would 
render that gulf less saline, affect the character and numbers 


532 


REVOLUTIONS IN AMERICAN HYDROGRAPHY. 


of its fish, and perhaps be not wholly without sensible influ¬ 
ence on the water of the Black Sea. 

Improvements in North American Hydrography . 

We are not yet well enough acquainted with the geography 
of Central Africa, or of the interior of South America, to con¬ 
jecture what hydrographical revolutions might there be 
wrought; but from the fact that many important rivers in 
both continents drain extensive table lands, of very moderate 
inclination, there is reason to suppose that important changes 
in the course of rivers might be accomplished. Our knowl¬ 
edge of the drainage of North America is much more com¬ 
plete, and it is certain that there are numerous points where 
the courses of great rivers, or the discharge of considerable 
lakes, might be completely diverted, or at least partially di¬ 
rected into different channels. 

The surface of Lake Erie is 565 feet above that of the Hud¬ 
son at Albany, and it is so near the level of the great plain 
lying east of it, that it was found practicable to supply the 
western section of the canal, which unites it with the Hudson, 
with water from the lake, or rather from the Niagara, which 
flows out of it. Hence a channel might be constructed, which 
would draw off into the valley of the Genesee any desirable 
proportion of the water naturally discharged by the Niagara. 
The greatest depth of water yet sounded in Lake Erie is but 
two hundred and seventy feet, the mean depth one hundred 
and twenty. Open canals parallel with the Niagara, or di¬ 
rectly toward the Genesee, might be executed upon a scale 
which would exercise an important influence on the drainage 
of the lake, if there were any adequate motive for such an un¬ 
dertaking. Still easier would it be to create additional outlets 
for the waters of Lake Superior at the Saut St. Mary—where 
the river which drains the lake descends twenty-two feet in a 
single mile—and thus produce incalculable effect, both upon 
that lake and the great chain of inland waters which commu¬ 
nicate with it. 

The summit level between Lake Michigan and the Dos 




DIVERSION OF THE RHINE. 


533 


Plaines, a tributary of the Mississippi, is only twenty-seven 
feet above the lake, and the intervening distance is but a very 
few miles. It has often been proposed to cut an open channel 
across this ridge, and there is no doubt of the practicability of 
the project. Were this accomplished, although such a cut 
would not, of itself, form a navigable canal, a part of the 
waters of Lake Michigan would be contributed to the Gulf of 
Mexico, instead of to that of St. Lawrence, and the flow might 
be so regulated as to keep the Illinois and the Mississippi at 
flood at all seasons of the year. The increase in the volume 
of these rivers would augment their velocity and their trans¬ 
porting power, and consequently, the erosion of their banks 
and the deposit of slime in the Gulf of Mexico, while the in¬ 
troduction of a larger body of cold water into the beds of these 
rivers would very probably produce a considerable effect on 
the animal life that peoples them. The diversion of w T ater 
from the common basin of the great lakes through a new chan¬ 
nel, in a direction opposite to their natural discharge, would 
not be absolutely without influence on the St. Lawrence, 
though probably the effect would be too small to be in any 
way perceptible. 

Diversion of the Rhine . 

The interference of physical improvements with vested 
rights and ancient arrangements, is a more formidable obstacle 
in old countries than in new, to enterprises involving anything 
approaching to a geographical revolution. Hence such pro¬ 
jects meet with stronger opposition in Europe than in Amer¬ 
ica, and the number of probable changes in the face of nature 
in the former continent is proportionally less. I have noticed 
some important hydraulic improvements as already executed' 
or in progress in Europe, and I may refer to some others as 
contemplated or suggested. One of these is the diversion of 
the Rhine from its present channel below Ragatz, by a cut 
through the narrow ridge near Sargans, and the consequent 
turning of its current into the Lake of Wallenstadt. This 
would be an extremely easy undertaking, for the ridge is but 


534 


DRAINING OF THE ZUIDERZEE. 


twenty feet above tbe level of the Rhine, and hardly two hun¬ 
dred yards wide. There is no present adequate motive for 
this diversion, but it is easy to suppose that it may become ad¬ 
visable within no long period. The navigation of the Lake 
of Constance is rapidly increasing in importance, and the 
shoaling of the eastern end of that lake by the deposits of the 
Rhine may require a remedy which can be found by no other 
so ready means as the discharge of that river into the Lake of 
Wallenstadt. The navigation of this latter lake is not import¬ 
ant, nor is it ever likely to become so, because the rocky and 
precipitous character of its shores renders their cultivation 
impossible. It is of great depth, and its basin is capacious 
enough to receive and retain all the sediment which the Rhine 
would carry into it for thousands of years. 


Draining of the Zuiderzee. 

I have referred to the draining of the Lake of Haarlem as 
an operation of great geographical as well as economical and 
mechanical interest. A much more gigantic project, of a sim¬ 
ilar character, is now engaging the attention of the Nether¬ 
landish engineers. It is proposed to drain the great salt-water 
basin called the Zuiderzee. This inland sea covers an area of 
not less than two thousand square miles, or about one million 
three hundred thousand acres. The seaward half, or that por¬ 
tion lying northwest of a line drawn from Enkhuizen to Sta- 
voren, is believed to have been converted from a marsh to an 
open bay since the fifth century after Christ, and this change 
is ascribed, partly if not wholly, to the interference of man 
with the order of nature. The Zuiderzee communicates with 
the sea by at least six considerable channels, separated from 
each other by low islands, and the tide rises within the basin 
to the height of three feet. To drain the Zuiderzee, these 
channels must first be closed and the passage of the tidal flood 
through them cut off. If this be done, the coast currents will 
be 1 estored approximately to the lines they followed fourteen 
or fifteen centuries ago, and there can be little doubt that an 





THE WATERS OF THE KARST. 


535 


appreciable effect will tlms be produced upon all tbe tidal 
phenomena of that coast, and, of course, upon the maritime 
geography of Holland. 

A ring dike and canal must then be constructed around 
the landward side of the basin, to exclude and carry off the 
fresh-water streams which now empty into it. One of these, 
the Ijssel, a considerable river, has a course of eighty miles, 
and is, in fact, one of the outlets of the Rhine, though aug¬ 
mented by the waters of several independent tributaries. 
Hiese preparations being made, and perhaps transverse dikes 
erected at convenient points for dividing the gulf into smaller 
portions, the water must be pumped out by machinery, in sub¬ 
stantially the same way as in the case of the Lake of Haarlem. 
Ho safe calculations can be made as to the expenditure of time 
and money required for the execution of this stupendous enter¬ 
prise, but I believe its practicability is not denied by compe¬ 
tent judges, though doubts are entertained as to its financial 
expediency. The geographical results of this improvement 
would be analogous to those of the draining of the Lake of 
Haarlem, but many times multiplied in extent, and its mete¬ 
orological effects, though perhaps not perceptible on the coast, 
could hardly fail to be appreciable in the interior of Holland. 

j 

Waters of the Karst. 

The singular structure of the Karst, the great limestone 
plateau lying to the north of Trieste, has suggested some en¬ 
gineering operations which might be attended with sensible 
effects upon the geography of the province. I have described 
this table land as, though now bare of forests, and almost of 
vegetation, having once been covered with woods, and as being 
completely honeycombed by caves through which the drain¬ 
age of that region is conducted. Schmidl has spent years in 
studying the subterranean geography and hydrography of this 
singular district, and his discoveries, and those of earlier cave- 
hunters, have led to various proposals of physical improve¬ 
ment of a novel character. Many of the underground water- 


536 


SUBTERRANEAN WATERS OF GREECE. 


courses of tlie Karst are without visible outlet, and, in some 
instances at least, they, no doubt, send their waters, by deep 
channels, to the Adriatic.* The city of Trieste is very insuffi¬ 
ciently provided with fresh water. It has been thought prac¬ 
ticable to supply this want by tunnelling through the wall of 
the plateau, which rises abruptly in the rear of the town, until 
some subterranean stream is encountered, the current of which 
can be conducted to the city. More visionary projectors have 
gone further, and imagined that advantage might be taken of 
the natural tunnels under the Karst for the passage of roads, 
railways, and even navigable canals. But however chimerical 
these latter schemes may seem, there is every reason to believe 
that art might avail itself of these galleries for improving the 
imperfect drainage of the champaign country bounded by the 
Karst, and that stopping or opening the natural channels 
might very much modify the hydrography of an extensive 
region. 

Subterranean Waters of Greece. 

There are parts of continental Greece which resemble the 
Karst and the adjacent plains in being provided with a natural 
subterranean drainage. The superfluous waters run off into 
limestone caves called catavothra ( KaraftoOpa ). In ancient 
times, the entrances to the catavothra were enlarged or par¬ 
tially closed as the convenience of drainage or irrigation re¬ 
quired, and there is no doubt that similar measures might be 
adopted at the present day with great advantage both to the 
salubrity and the productiveness of the regions so drained. 

* The Recca, a river with a considerable current, has been satisfactorily 
identified with a stream flowing through the cave of Trebich, and with the 
Timavo—the Timavus of Yirgil and the ancient geographers—which empties 
through several mouths into the Adriatic between Trieste and Aquileia. 
The distance from Trieste to a suitable point in the grotto of Trebich is 
thought to be less than three miles, and the difficulties in the way of con¬ 
structing a tunnel do not seem formidable. The works of Schmidl, Die 
JEfoJilen des Karstes , and Der unterirdische Lauf der Recca, are not common 
out of Germany, but the reader will find many interesting facts derived 
from them in two articles entitled Der unterirdische Lauf der Recca , in 
Aus der Natur , xx , pp. 250-254, 263-266. 






COVERING ROCK WITH EARTH. 


537 


Soil below Rock. 

One of the most singular changes of natural surface effect¬ 
ed by man is that observed by Beechey and by Barth at Lin 
Tefla, and near Gebel Genftnes, in the district of Ben Gasi, in 
Northern Africa. In this region the superficial stratum origi¬ 
nally consisted of a thin sheet of rock covering a layer of fer¬ 
tile earth. This rock has been broken up, and, when not prac¬ 
ticable to find use for it in fences, fortresses, or dwellings, 
heaped together in high piles, and the soil, thus bared of its 
stony shell, has been employed for agricultural purposes.* If 
we remember that gunpowder was unknown at the period 
when these remarkable improvements were executed, and of 
course that the rock could have been broken only with the 
chisel and wedge, we must infer that land had at that time a 
very great pecuniary value, and, of course, that the province, 
though now exhausted, and almost entirely deserted by man, 
had once a dense population. 

Covering Rock with Earth . 

If man has, in some cases, broken up rock to reach produc¬ 
tive ground beneath, he has, in many other instances, covered 
bare ledges, and sometimes extensive surfaces of solid stone, 
with fruitful earth, brought from no inconsiderable distance. 
Not to speak of the Campo Santo at Pisa, filled, or at least 
coated, with earth from the Holy Land, for quite a different 
purpose, it is affirmed that the garden of the monastery of St. 
Catherine at Mount Sinai is composed of Nile mud, transport¬ 
ed on the backs of camels from the banks of that river. Par 
they and older authors state that all the productive soil of the 
Island of Malta was brought over from Sicily.f The accuracy 

* Barth, Wanderungen durch die Kdsten des Mittelmeeres , i, p. 353. 
In a note on page 380, of the same volume, Barth cites Strabo as asserting 
that a similar practice prevailed in Iapygia; but it may he questioned 
whether the epithet rpa^ela, applied by Strabo to the original surface, ne¬ 
cessarily implies that it was covered with a continuous stratum of rock, 
t Parthey, Wanderungen durch Sicilien und die Levante, i, p. 404. 


538 


TIIE WADIES OF AEAETA PETEJSA. 


of the information may be questioned in both cases, but similar 
practices, on a smaller scale, are matter of daily observation in 
many parts of Southern Europe. Much of the wine of the 
Moselle is derived from grapes grown on earth carried high 
up the cliffs on the shoulders of men. In China, too, rock 
has been artificially covered with earth to an extent which 
gives such operations a real geographical importance, and the 
accounts of the importation of earth at Malta, and the fertiliza¬ 
tion of the rocks on Mount Sinai with slime from the Hile, 
may be not wholly without foundation. 


Wadies of Arabia Petr mi. 


In the latter case, indeed, river sediment might be very 
useful as a manure, but it could hardly be needed as a soil; 
for the growth of vegetation in the wadies of the Sinaitic Pen¬ 
insula shows that the disintegrated rock of its mountains re¬ 
quires only water to stimulate it to considerable productive¬ 
ness. The wadies present, not unfrequently, narrow gorges, 
which might easily be closed, and thus accumulations of earth, 
and reservoirs of water to irrigate it, might be formed which 
would convert many a square mile of desert into flourishing 
date gardens and cornfields. Hot far from Wadi Feiran, on 
the most direct route to Wadi Esh-Sheikh, is a very narrow 
pass called by the Arabs El Bueb (El Pab) or, The Gate, 
which might be securely closed to a very considerable height, 
with little labor or expense. Above this pass is a wide and 
nearly level expanse, containing a hundred acres, perhaps 
much more. This is filled up to a certain regular level with 
deposits brought down by torrents before the Gate, or Bueb, 
was broken through, and they have now worn down a channel 
in the deposits to the bed of the wadi. If a dam were con¬ 
structed at the pass, and reservoirs built to retain the winter 
rains, a great extent of valley might be rendered cultivable. 








INCIDENTAL EFFECTS OF HUMAN ACTION. 


539 


Incidental Effects of Human Action. 

I have more than once alluded to the collateral and un¬ 
sought consequences of human action as being often more mo¬ 
mentous than the direct and desired results. There are cases 
where such incidental, or, in popular speech, accidental, conse¬ 
quences, though of minor importance in themselves, serve to 
illustrate natural processes ; others, where, by the magnitude 
and character of the material traces they leave behind them, 
they prove that man, in primary or in more advanced stages 
of social life, must have occupied particular districts for a 
longer period than has been supposed by popular chronology. 
“ On the coast of Jutland,” says Forchhammer, “ wherever a 
bolt from a wreck or any other fragment of iron is deposited 
in the beach sand, the particles are cemented together, and 
form a very solid mass around the iron. A remarkable forma¬ 
tion of this sort was observed a few years ago in constructing 
the sea wall of the harbor of Elsineur. This stratum, which 
seldom exceeded a foot in thickness, rested upon common 
beach sand, and was found at various depths, less near the 
shore, greater at some distance from it. It was composed of 
pebbles and sand, and contained a great quantity of pins, and 
some coins of the reign of Christian IV, between the begin¬ 
ning and the middle of the seventeenth century. Here and 
there, a coating of metallic copper had been deposited by gal¬ 
vanic action, and the presence of completely oxydized metallic 
iron was often detected. An investigation undertaken by 
Councillor Reinhard and myself, at the instance of the Society 
of Science, made it in the highest degree probable that this 
formation owed its origin to the street sweepings of the town, 
which had been thrown upon the beach, and carried off and 
distributed by the waves over the bottom of the harbor.”* 
These and other familiar observations of the like sort show 
that a sandstone reef, of no inconsiderable magnitude, might 


* Geognostische Studien am Meeres Ufer , Leonhard und Beonn, Jahr- 
buch , 1841, pp. 25, 26. 


540 


INCIDENTAL EFFECTS OF HUMAN ACTION. 


originate from the stranding of a ship with a cargo of iron,* or. 
from throwing the waste of an establishment for working met¬ 
als into running water which might carry it to the sea. 

Partliey records a singular instance of unforeseen mischief 
from an interference with the arrangements of nature. A land- 
owner at Malta possessed a rocky plateau sloping gradually 
toward the sea, and terminating in a precipice forty or fifty 
feet high, through natural openings in which the sea water 
flowed into a large cave under the rock. The proprietor at¬ 
tempted to establish salt works on the surface, and cut shallow 
pools in the rock for the evaporation of the water. In order 
to fill the salt pans more readily, he sank a well down to the 
cave beneath, through which he drew up water by a windlass 
and buckets. The speculation proved a failure, because the 
water filtered through the porous bottom of the pans, leaving 
little salt behind. Put this was a small evil, compared with 
other destructive consequences that followed. When the sea 
was driven into the cave by violent west or northwest winds, 
it shot a jet dean through the well to the height of sixty feet, 
the spray of which was scattered far and wide over the neigh¬ 
boring gardens and blasted the crops. The well was now 
closed with stones, but the next winter’s storms hurled them 
out again, and spread the salt spray over the grounds in the 
vicinity as before. Repeated attempts were made to stop the 
orifice, but at the time of Parthey’s visit the sea had thrice 
burst through, and it was feared that the evil was without 
remedy, f 

I have mentioned the great exent of the heaps of oyster 
and other shells left by the American Indians on the Atlantic 
coast of the United States. Some of the Danish kitchen- 
middens, which closely resemble them, are a thousand feet 
long, from one hundred and fifty to two hundred wide, and 
from six to ten high. These piles have an importance as geo¬ 
logical witnesses, independent of their bearing upon human 

* Kohl, Schleswig-Holstein , ii, p. 45. 

t Wandenmgen (Lurch Sicilien und die Lee ante, i, p. 406. 






INCIDENTAL EFFECTS OF HUMAN ACTION. 


541 


history. Wherever the coast line appears, from other evidence, 
to have remained unchanged in outline and elevation since 
they were accumulated, they are found near the sea, and not 
more than about ten feet above its level. In some cases they 
are at a considerable distance from the beach, and in these in¬ 
stances, so far as yet examined, there are proofs that the coast 
has advanced in consequence of upheaval or of fluviatile or 
marine deposit. Where they are altogether wanting, the coast 
seems to have sunk or been washed away by the sea. The 
constancy of these observations justifies geologists in arguing, 
where other evidence is wanting, the advance of land or sea 
respectively, or the elevation or depression of the former, from 
the position or the absence of these heaps alone. 

Every traveller in Italy is familiar with Monte Testaccio, 
the mountain of potsherds, at Rome; but this deposit, large 
as it is, shrinks into insignificance when compared with masses 
of similar origin in the neighborhood of older cities. The cast¬ 
away pottery of ancient towns in Magna Grsecia composes 
strata of such extent and thickness that they have been digni¬ 
fied with the appellation of the ceramic formation. The Rile, 
as it slowly changes its bed, exposes in its banks masses of the 
same material, so vast that the population of the world during 
the whole historical period would seem to have chosen this 
valley as a general deposit for its broken vessels. 

The fertility imparted to the banks of the Rile by the wa¬ 
ter and the slime of the inundations, is such that manures are 
little employed. Hence much domestic waste, which would 
elsewhere be employed to enrich the soil, is thrown out into 
vacant places near the town. Hills of rubbish are thus piled 
up which astonish the traveller almost as much as the solid 
pyramids themselves. The heaps of ashes and other house¬ 
hold refuse collected on the borders and within the limits of 
Cairo were so large, that the removal of them by Ibrahim 
Pacha has been looked upon as one of the great works of the 
age. 

The soil near cities, the street sweepings of which are 
spread upon the ground as manure, is perceptibly raised by 


542 


EARTHQUAKES. 


them and by other effects of human industry, and in spite of 
all efforts to remove the waste, the level of the ground on 
wdiich large towns stand is constantly elevated. The present 
streets of Rome are twenty feet above those of the ancient 
city. The Appian way between Rome and Albano, when 
cleared out a few years ago, was found buried four or five feet 
deep, and the fields along the road were elevated nearly or 
quite as much. The floors of many churches in Italy, not 
more than six or seven centuries old, are now three or four feet 
below the adjacent streets, though it is proved by excavations 
that they were built as many feet above them. 

Resistance to Great Natural Forces. 

I have often spoken of the greater and more subtile natural 
forces, and especially of geological agencies, as powers beyond 
human guidance or resistance. This is no doubt at present 
true in the main, but man has shown that he is not altogether 
impotent to struggle with even these mighty servants of na¬ 
ture, and his unconscious as well as his deliberate action may 
in some cases have increased or diminished the intensity of their 
energies. It is a very ancient belief that earthquakes are more 
destructive in districts where the crust of the earth is solid and 
homogeneous, than where it is of a looser and more interrupt¬ 
ed structure. Aristotle, Pliny the elder, and Seneca believed 
that not only natural ravines and caves, but quarries, wells, 
and other human excavations, which break the continuity of 
the terrestrial strata and facilitate the escape of elastic vapors, 
have a sensible influence in diminishing the violence and pre¬ 
venting the propagation of the earth waves. In all countries 
subject to earthquakes this opinion is still maintained, and it 
is asserted that, both in ancient and in modern times, buildings 
protected by deep wells under or near them have suffered less 
from earthquakes than those the architects of which have neg 
lected this precaution.* 

* Landgp.ebe, Naturgeschichte der Vulkane , ii, pp. 19, 20. 







EARTHQUAKES. 


543 


If tlie commonly received theory of the cause of earth¬ 
quakes is true—that, namely, which ascribes them to the elas¬ 
tic force of gases accumulated or generated in subterranean 
reservoirs—it is evident that open channels of communication 
between such reservoirs and the atmosphere might serve as a 
harmless discharge of gases that would otherwise acquire de¬ 
structive energy. The doubt is whether artificial excavations 
can be carried deep enough to reach the laboratory where the 
elastic fluids are distilled. There are, in many places, small 
natural crevices through which such fluids escape, and the 
source of them sometimes lies at so moderate a depth that they 
pervade the superficial soil and, as it were, transpire from it, 
over a considerable area. When the borer of an ordinary ar¬ 
tesian well strikes into a cavity in the earth, imprisoned air 
often rushes out with great violence, and this has been still 
more frequently observed in sinking mineral-oil wells. In 
this latter case, the discharge of a vehement current of inflam¬ 
mable fluid sometimes continues for hours and even longer 
periods. These facts seem to render it not wholly improbable 
that the popular belief of the efficacy of deep wells in miti¬ 
gating the violence of earthquakes is well founded. 

In general, light, wooden buildings are less injured by 
earthquakes than more solid structures of stone or brick, and 
it is commonly supposed that the power put forth by the earth 
wave is too great to be resisted by any amount of weight or 
solidity of mass that man can pile up upon the surface. Bat 
the fact that in countries subject to earthquakes many very large 
and strongly constructed palaces, temples, and other monu¬ 
ments have stood for centuries, comparatively uninjured, sug¬ 
gests a doubt whether this opinion is sound. The earthquake 
of the first of November, 1755, which was felt over a twelfth 
part of the earth’s surface, was probably the most violent of 
which we have any clear and distinct account, and it seems to 
have exerted its most destructive force at Lisbon. It has often 
been noticed as a remarkable fact, that the mint, a building 
of great solidity, was almost wholly unaffected by the shock 
which shattered every house and church in the city, and it? 


544 


RESISTANCE TO VOLCANIC ACTION. 


escape from tlie common ruin can hardly be accounted for ex¬ 
cept upon the supposition that its weight, compactness, and 
strength of material enabled it to resist an agitation of the 
earth which overthrew all weaker structures. On the other 
hand, a stone pier in the harbor of Lisbon, on which thousands 
of people had taken refuge, sank with its foundations to a 
great depth during the same earthquake ; and it is plain that 
where subterranean cavities exist, at moderate depths, the erec¬ 
tion of heavy masses upon them would tend to promote the 
breaking down of the strata which roof them over. 

No physicist, I believe, has supposed that man can avert 
the eruption of a volcano or diminish the quantity of melted 
rock which it pours out of the bowels of the earth; but it is 
not always impossible to divert the course of even a large cur¬ 
rent of lava. “ The smaller streams of lava near Catania,” 
says Ferrara, in describing the great eruption of 1669, “ were 
turned from their course by building dry walls of stone as a 
barrier against them. * * * It was proposed to divert 

the main current from Catania, and fifty men, protected by 
hides, were sent with hooks and iron bars to break the flank 
of the stream near Belpasso.* When the opening was made, 

* Soon after the current issues from the volcano, it is covered above 
and at its sides, and finally in front, with scoriae, formed by the cooling of 
the exposed surface, which bury and conceal the fluid mass. The stream 
rolls on under the coating, and between the walls of scoriae, and it was the 
lateral crust which was broken through by the workmen mentioned in 
the text. 

The distance to which lava flows, before its surface begins to solidify, 
depends on its volume, its composition, its temperature and that of the air, 
the force with which it is ejected, and the inclination of the declivity over 
which it runs. In most cases it is difficult to approach the current at points 
where it is still entirely fluid, and hence opportunities of observing it in 
that condition are not very frequent. In the eruption of February, 1851, 
on the east side of Vesuvius, I went quite up to one of the outlets. The 
lava shot out of the orifice upward with great velocity, like the water 
from a spring, in a stream eight or ten feet in diameter, throwing up occa¬ 
sionally volcanic bombs, but it immediately spread out on the declivity 
down which it flowed, to the width of several yards. It continued red hot 
in broad daylight, and without a particle of scoriae on its surface, for a 


EFFECTS OF MINING. 


545 


iluid lava poured forth and flowed rapidly toward Paterno ; 
but the inhabitants of that place, not caring to sacrifice their 
own town to save Catania, rushed out in arms and put a stop 
to the operation.'’ * In the eruption of Yesuvius in 1794, the 
viceroy saved from impending destruction the town of Portici, 
and the valuable collection of antiquities then deposited there 
but since removed to Naples, by employing several thousand 
men to dig a ditch above the town, by which the lava current 
was carried off in another direction.f 

Effects of Mining . 

The excavations made by man, for mining and other pur¬ 
poses, may sometimes occasion disturbance of the surface by 
the subsidence of the strata above them, as in the case of the 
mine of Falilun, but such accidents must always be too incon¬ 
siderable in extent to deserve notice in a geographical point of 
view. Such excavations, however, may interfere materially 
with the course of subterranean waters, and it has even been 
conjectured that the removal of large bodies of metallic ore 

course of at least one hundred yards. At this distance, the suffocating, 
sulphurous vapors became so dense that I could follow the current no far¬ 
ther. The undulations of the surface were like those of a brook swollen 
by rain. I estimated the height of the waves at five or six inches by a 
breadth of eighteen or twenty. To the eye, the fluidity of the lava seemed 
as perfect as that of water, but masses of cold lava weighing ten or fifteen 
pounds floated upon it like cork. 

The heat emitted by lava currents seems extremely small when we con¬ 
sider the temperature required to fuse such materials and the great length 
of time they take in cooling. I saw at FTicolosi ancient oil jars, holding a 
hundred gallons or more, which had been dug out from under a stream of 
old lava above that town. They had been very slightly covered with vol¬ 
canic ashes before the lava flowed over them, but the lead with which 
holes in them had been plugged was not melted. The current that buried 
Mompiliere in 1669 was thirty-five feet thick, but marble statues, in a 
church over which the lava formed an arch, were found uncalcined and 
uninjured in 1704. 

* Ferrara, Descrizione deW Etna , p. 108. 

t Landgbebe, Naturgeschichte der VuVcane , ii, p. 82. 

35 


546 


BURNING COAL MINES. 


from its original deposit might, at least locally, affect the mag¬ 
netic and electrical condition of the earth’s crust to a sensible 
degree. 

Accidental fires in mines of coal or lignite sometimes lead 
to consequences not only destructive to large quantities of val¬ 
uable material, but may, directly or indirectly, produce results 
important in geography. The coal occasionally takes fire from 
the miners’ lights or other fires used by them, and, if long ex¬ 
posed to air in deserted galleries, may be spontaneously kin¬ 
dled. Under favorable circumstances, a stratum of coal will 
burn till it is exhausted, and a cavity may be burnt out in a 
few months which human labor could not excavate in many 
years. W ittwer informs us that a coal mine at St. Etienne in 
Dauphiny has been burning ever since the fourteenth century, 
and that a mine near Duttweiler, another near Epterode, and 
a third at Zwickau, have been on fire for two hundred years. 
Such conflagrations not only produce cavities in the earth, but 
communicate a perceptible degree of heat to the surface, and 
the author just quoted cites cases where this heat has been ad¬ 
vantageously employed in forcing vegetation.* 

* PhysiJcalische Geographic , p. 168. Beds of peat, accidentally set on 
fire, sometimes continue to burn for months. I take the following account 
of a case of this sort from a recent American journal: 

“ A Curious Phenomenon. —When the track of the railroad between 
Brunswick and Bath was being graded, in crossing a meadow near the 
populous portion of the latter city, the ‘ dump ’ suddenly took on a sink¬ 
ing symptom, and down went the twenty feet fill of gravel, clay, and 
broken rocks, out of sight, and it was a long, long time before dirt trains 
could fill the capacious stomach that seemed ready to receive all the solid 
material that could be turned into it. The difficulty was at length over¬ 
come, but all along the side of the sinkage the earth was thrown up, broken 
into yawning chasms, and the surface was thus elevated above its old watery 
level. Since that time this ground, thus slightly elevated, has been culti¬ 
vated, and has yielded enormously of whatever the owner seemed disposed 
to plant upon it. Some three months ago, by some means unknown to us, 
the underlying peat took fire, and for weeks, as we had occasion to pass it, 
we noticed the smoke arising from the smouldering combustion beneath 
the surface. Rains fell, but the fire burned, and the smoke continued to 
arise. Monday we had occasion to pass the spot, and though nearly a 


RIVER SEDIMENT. 


547 


Esjpifs Theories. 

Espy’s well known suggestion of the possibility of causing 
rain artificially, by kindling great fires, is not "likely to be 
turned to practical account, but the speculations of this able 
meteorologist are not, for that reason, to be rejected as worth¬ 
less. His labors exhibit great industry in the collection of 
facts, mucli ingenuity in dealing with them, remarkable in¬ 
sight into the laws of nature, and a ready perception of analo¬ 
gies and relations not obvious to minds less philosophically 
constituted. They have unquestionably contributed very es¬ 
sentially to the advancement of meteorological science. The 
possibility that the distribution and action of electricity may 
be considerably modified by long lines of iron railways and 
telegraph wires, is a kindred thought, and in fact rests much 
on the same foundation as the belief in the utility of lightning 
rods, but such influence is too obscure and too small to have 
been yet detected. 

River Sediment. 

The manifestation of the internal heat of the earth at any 
given point is conditioned by the thickness of the crust at such 
point. The deposits of rivers tend to augment that thickness at 
their estuaries. The sediment of slowly flowing rivers empty¬ 
ing into shallow seas is spread over so great a surface that we 
can hardly imagine the foot or two of slime they let fall over 
a wide area in a century to form an element among even the 
infinitesimal quantities which compose the terms of the equa¬ 
tions of nature. But some swift rivers, rolling mountains of 
fine earth, discharge themselves into deeply scooped gulfs or 
bays, and in such cases the deposit amounts, in the course of a 
few years, to a mass the transfer of which from the surface of a 
large basin, and its accumulation at a single point, may be 

week’s rain had been drenching the ground, and though the surface was 
whitened with snow, and though pools of water were standing upon the 
surface in the immediate neighborhood, still the everlasting subterranean 
fire was burning, and the smoke arising through the snow.” 


548 


NATURE KNOWS NO TRIFLES. 


supposed to produce other effects than those measurable by 
the sounding line. Now, almost all the operations of rural 
life, as I have abundantly shown, increase the liability of the 
soil to erosion by water. Hence, the clearing of the valley of 
the Ganges by man must have much augmented the quantity 
of earth transported by that river to the sea, and of course 
have strengthened the effects, whatever they may be, of thick¬ 
ening the crust of the earth in the Bay of Bengal. In such 
cases, then, human action must rank among geological in¬ 
fluences. 


Nothing Small in Nature. 

It is a legal maxim that “ the law concerneth not itself 
with trifles,” de minimus non curat lex / but in the vocabulary 
of nature, little and great are terms of comparison only; she 
knows no trifles, and her laws are as inflexible in dealing with 
an atom as with a continent or a planet.* The human opera- 

* One of the sublimest, and at the same time most fearful suggestions 
that have been prompted by the researches of modern science, was made 
by Babbage in the ninth chapter of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. I 
have not the volume at hand, but the following explanation will recall to the 
reader, if it does not otherwise make intelligible, the suggestion I refer to. 

No atom can be disturbed in place, or undergo any change of temper¬ 
ature, of electrical state, or other material condition, without affecting, by 
attraction or repulsion or other communication, the surrounding atoms. 
These, again, by the same law, transmit the influence to other atoms, and 
the impulse thus given extends through the whole material universe. 
Every human movement, every organic act, every volition, passion, or 
emotion, every intellectual process, is accompanied with atomic disturbance, 
and hence every such movement, every such act or process affects all the 
atoms of universal matter. Though action and reaction are equal, yet re¬ 
action does not restore disturbed atoms to their former place and condition, 
and consequently the effects of the least material change are never can¬ 
celled, but in some way perpetuated, so that no action can take place in 
physical, moral, or intellectual nature, without leaving all matter in a dif¬ 
ferent state from what it would have been if such action had not occurred. 
Hence, to use language which I have employed on another occasion : there 
exists, not alone in the human conscience or in the omniscience of the 
Creator, but in external material nature, an ineffaceable, imperishable 


MAN AND NATURE. 


549 


tions mentioned in the last few paragraphs, therefore, do act in 
the ways ascribed to them, though our limited faculties are at 
present, perhaps forever, incapable of weighing their imme¬ 
diate, still more their ultimate consequences. But our inabil¬ 
ity to assign definite values to these causes of the disturbance 
of natural arrangements is not a reason for ignoring the exist¬ 
ence of such causes in any general view of the relations be¬ 
tween man and nature, and we are never justified in assuming 
a force to be insignificant because its measure is unknown, or 
even because no physical effect can now be traced to it as its 
origin. The collection of phenomena must precede the analy¬ 
sis of them, and every new fact, illustrative of the action and 
reaction between humanity and the material world around it, 
is another step toward the determination of the great question, 
whether man is of nature or above her. 

record, possibly legible even to created intelligence, of every act done, 
every word uttered, nay, of every wish and purpose and thought conceived 
by mortal man, from the birth of our first parent to the final extinction of 
our race ; so that the physical traces of our most secret sins shall last until 
time shall be merged in that eternity of which not science, but religion 
alone, assumes to take cognizance. 






INDEX. 


■ 4 - 


A BBEYS of St. Germain and St. Denis, 
revenues of, 6. 

Adirondack forest, 235 ; lakes of, 35'7. 
Ailanthus glandulosa, 515. 

Akaba, gulf of, infiltration of fresh water 
in, 440. 

Albano, lake of, artificial lowering of, 353. 
Algeria, deserts of, artesian wells in, 443 ; 
sand dunes of, 463 ; consolidated dunes, 
480. 

Alpaca, South American, 83. 

Amazon, Indians of, 11. 

Ameland, island of, 499. 

America, North, primitive physical con¬ 
dition of, 27, 43 ; forests of, 28 ; pos¬ 
sibility of noting its physical changes, 
52 ; by scientific observation, 53 ; for¬ 
est trees of, 274; sand dunes of, 469 ; 
proposed changes in hydrography of, 
532. 

Animal life, sympathy of ruder races 
with, 39 ; instinct, fallibility of, 40; 
hostility of civilized man to inferior 
forms of, 121. 

Animals, wild, action of on vegetation, 78. 
Aphis, the European, 104. 

Apennines, effects of felling the woods 
on, 150, 152. 

Appian way, the, 542. 

Aqueducts, geographical and climatic ef¬ 
fects of, 358. 

Arabia Petraea, surface drainage of, 440 ; 
sandstone of, 452; sands and petrified 
wood of, 455 ; wadies of, 538. 

Aragua, valley of, Venezuela, 202. 

Ararat, Mt., phenomenon of vegetation 
on, 287. 

Ardeche, 1’, department of, 152 ; de¬ 
struction of forests in, 389. 

—river and basin, floods of, 386; supply of 


water to the Rhone, 388, 398 ; violence 
of inuudations of, 388 ; damage done 
by, 390; effect on river beds, 391; 
force of its affluents, 392. 

Argostoli, Cephalonia, millstreams of, 
434. 

Armenia, ancient irrigation of, 366. 

Arno, the river, deposits of, 414; upper 
course of in the Val di Chiana, 417, 
420. 

Artesian wells, their sources, 441 ; usual 
objects, 442; occasional effects, 442 ; 
employment in the Algerian desert, 
443 ; by the French Government, 444 ; 
success and probable results of, 445 ; 
knownU;o the ancients, 443 ; depth of, 
444. 

Arundo arenaria, 501. 

Ascension, island of, 205. 

Auk, the wingless, extirpation of, 95. 

Australia a field of physical observation, 
61. 

Avalanches, Alpine, various causes of, 
266 ; by felling trees, 270. 

Azoff, sea of, proposed changes, 531. 

B ABINET, plan for artificial springs, 
by, 448. 

Baikal Lake, the fish of, 117. 

Baltic Sea, sand dunes of, 467. 
Barcelonette, valley of, former fertility, 
243 ; present degradation of, 244. 
Bavaria, scarcity of fuel in, 299. 

Bear, the mythical character of, 40. 
Beaver, the, agency in forming bogs, 31; 

cause of its increased numbers, 84. 

Bee, the honey, products of, 105; intro¬ 
duction in United States, 106. 

Belgium, effect of plantations in, 152; 
Cam pine of, 513. 







552 


INDEX. 


Ben GA,si, district of, rock formation in, 
537. 

Bergamo, change of climate in the val¬ 
ley of, 151. 

Bibliographical list of authorities, vii. 

Birch tree (black and yellow), produce 
of, 171. 

Birds, number of, in United States, 86; 
the turkey, dove, pigeon, 87 ; as sowers 
and consumers of seeds, 87; as destroy¬ 
ers of insects, 89; injurious extirpation 
of, 90; wanton destruction of, 92; 
weakness of, 93 ; instinct of migratory, 
94; extinction of species, 95; com¬ 
mercial value of, 97; introduction of 
species, 98. 

Bison, the American, 78 ; number and 
migrations of, 81, 83 ; domesticated, 
135. 

Blackbird, the proscription of, 91. 

Bogs, formation and nomenclature of, 
29-32; of New England, 29; repos¬ 
itories of fuel, 30. 

Bremontier, system of dune plantations 
of, 503 ; a benefactor to his race, 515. 

Breton, Cap, dune vineyards of, 508. 

Busbequius’ letters, 64. 

C AMEL, the, transfer and migrations of, 
83 ; injurious to vegetation, 132. 
Campine of Belgium, 513. 

Canada thistle, the, 68. 

Canals, geographic and climatic effects 
of, 359 ; injurious effects of Tuscan, 
359; projected, Suez, 519; Isthmus 
of Darien, 522 ; to the Dead Sea, 524; 
maritime, in Greece, 526 ; Saros, 527 ; 
Cape Cod, 528; the Don and the Volga, 
531; Lake Erie and the Genesee, 532 ; 
Lake Michigan and the Mississippi, 533. 
Cape Cod, sand dunes of, 487 ; legislative 
protection of, 502 ; vegetation of, 503 ; 
projected canal through, 528. 
Cappercailzie, the, extinction of, in Brit¬ 
ain, 96. 

Carniola, caves of, 434. 

Caspian Sea, proposed changes in its 
basin, 531. 

Catania, lava streams of, 544. 

Catavothra of Greece, 536. 

Cevennes, effects of clearing the, 153. 
Champlain, lake, dates of its congelation, 
163. 

Cherbourg, breakwater of, 46, 332. 
Chiana, Val di, description and character 
of, 417-420; plans for its restoration,’ 
420; artificial drainage of, attempted, 
421 ; successfully executed, 423. 


Clergy, mediaeval, their character, 282. 
Climatic change, discussions of, 9 ; how 
tested, 20; causes producing, in New 
England, Africa, Arabia Petraea, 20- 
22 ; man’s action on, difficult to ascer¬ 
tain, 51 ; deterioration, 71. 

Coal mines, combustion of, 546. 

Coal, sea, early use of, for fuel, 222 ; in¬ 
creased use of, in Paris, 295. 

Coast line, change of, from natural causes, 
331; subject to human guidance, 332. 
Cochineal insect transferred to Spain, 
105. 

Cochituate Aqueduct, Boston, 103. 

Col Isoard, valley of, devastated, 242. 
Commerce, modern, on what dependent, 
60. 

Como, lake of, proposed lowering of, 

358. 

Constance, lake of, 534. 

Cork-oak tree, yield of, 311. 

Corporations, social and political, influ¬ 
ence of, 54. 

Cosmical influences, 13. 

Cotton, early cultivation of, 61 ; can be 
raised by white labor, 381, 

Crawley Sparrow Club, 90. 

Cuivents, sea, strength of, 456; in the 
Bosphorus, 457. 

Cuyahoga river, 208. 

Cypress tree, its beauty, 314. 

D AKIEN, Isthmus of, proposed canal 
across, 522 ; conjectural effects of, 
523. 

Dead Sea, projected canals to, 524; pos¬ 
sible results of, 525. 

Deer, numbers of, in United States, 82; 

tame, injurious to trees, 130. 

Denmark, peat mosses of, 22 ; dunes of, 
497 ; extent and movement of, 498 ; 
legislative protection of, 501, 504. 
Desert, the, richness of local color, 445 ; 

mirage in, 446. 

Des Plaines river, 583. 

Despotism a cause of physical decay, 5. 
Dikes, recovery of land by, in the Nether¬ 
lands, 335 ; early usage and immense 
extent of, 336 ; encouraged by the 
Spaniards, 337 ; details of their con¬ 
struction and effect on the land gained, 
340-345 ; in Egypt, 413. 

Dinornis, or moa, recent extirpation of, 
in New Zealand, 95. 

Dodo, the, extirpation of, 95. 

Domestic animals, action of, on vegetation, 
79; origin and transfer of, 82 ; inju¬ 
rious to the forest growth, 130. 





INDEX. 


553 


Don river, proposed diversion of, 531. 
Draining a geographical element,’ 360; 
superficial, its necessity in forest lands, 

363 ; effect on temperature, 364; un¬ 
derground, ib. ; extensive use of, in 
England, 362 ; affects the atmosphere, 

364 ; disturbs the equilibrium of river 
supply, 365; by boring, 362; in France, 
&c., 362 ; Paris, 363. 

Drance, Switzerland, glacier lake of, 403. 
Dry land and water, relative extent of, 178. 
Dwight, Dr., Travels in the United States, 
characterized, 52. 

E ARTH, fertile, below the rock, 537; 
transported to cover rocky surfaces, 
537. 

Earthquakes, effects of, 542 ; causes and 
possible prevention of, 543 ; of Lisbon, 
544. 

Earthworm, utility of, in agriculture, 100; 

multiplication of, in New England, 101. 
Egypt, catacombs, 70; papyrus or wa¬ 
ter lily, 70; poisonous snakes of, 112 ; 
supposed increase of rain in, 190 ; pro¬ 
ductiveness of, 230 ; necessity and ex¬ 
tent of irrigation in, 368, 373 ; cultiva¬ 
ted soil of, 372, 374; population of, 
37 4; amount of water used for irriga¬ 
tion, 380 ; saline deposits, 382; artifi¬ 
cial river courses of, 402; cultivated 
area of, 412; sands of, 458; their 
prevalence and extent, 459; source of, 
461; action on the Delta and cultiva¬ 
ted land, 462 ; effect of the diversion of 
the Nile on, 529; refuse heaps near 
Cairo, 541. 

Eland, the, preserved in Prussia, 86. 

Elm, the Washington, Cambridge, 146. 
Elsineur, artificial formation in harbor of, 
639. 

England, forest economy of, 221, large 
extent of ornamental plantations, 222; 
Forests of, described by Csesar, 222; 
private enterprise in sylviculture, 292; 
sand dunes of, 507. 

Enguerrand de Coucy, cruelty of, 281. 
Erie Canal, the, influence on the fauna 
and flora of its region, 116; lake, 
depth and level of, 532; proposed ca¬ 
nal from, 532. 

Espy’s theories of artificial raiu, 547. 
Etna, volcanic lava and dust, 131. 
Euphrates, sand plains in the valley of, 
511. 

Eye, cultivation of the, 11; control of the 
limbs by, 12; trained by the study of 
physical geography, 12. 


jpEUDALISM, pernicious influence of, 

Fir tree, the, its products, 311. 

Fire weed, in burnt forests of the United 
States, 287. 

Fish, destruction of, by man, 112, 114, 
120, 122; voracity of, 114; introduc¬ 
tion and breeding of foreign, 116; nat¬ 
uralization of, 117; inferiority of the 
artificially fattened, 121. 

Fish, shell, extensive remains of, in Uni¬ 
ted States, 117; of Indian origin, 128. 

Fish ponds of Catholic countries, 426. 

Fontainebleau, forest of, 34, 130; poach¬ 
ing in, 284; its renovation, 316; soil 
of, 513. 

Food, ancient arts of preservation of, 18. 

Forest, the, influence of, on the humidity 
of air, 162; do. of earth, 165; as or¬ 
ganic, 166 ; balance of conflicting influ¬ 
ences in, 176; influence on tempera¬ 
ture, 178; on precipitation, 181, 196; 
in South America, 184; the Canary Isl¬ 
ands and Asia Minor, 185 ; Peru, 188 ; 
Palestine, Southern France, Scotland 
and Egypt, 189; influence of, on hu¬ 
midity of soil, 196; on springs, 197; 
in Venezuela, 202 ; New Granada, 204; 
Switzerland and France, 205, 208; 
United States, 207 ; in winter, 210 ; 
general consequences of its destruction, 
214; on the earth, springs, rivers, 
215 ; literature of, in France, 217; Ger¬ 
many, 218 ; Italy, 218 ; England, 221; 
influence of, on inundations, 223; in 
North America, 225; disputed effect 
of, in Europe, 228.; principal causes of 
its destruction, 270; in British Ameri¬ 
ca, 271; in Europe, 279 ; royal forests, 
280; effects of the Revolution on, in 
France, 284; utility of, for the preserva¬ 
tion of smaller plants, 286, 290; do. of 
birds, 291; economic utility of, and 
necessity for its restoration, 292; ex¬ 
tent of, in Europe, 296 ; proportion in 
different countries of, 300; of the Uni¬ 
ted States and Canada, 300; economy 
of, 303; management of, in France, 
304; European forests, all of artificial 
growth, 305; artificial and natural, 
their respective advantages, 307 ; 
American do., their peculiar characteris¬ 
tics, 313 ; economic action of cattle on, 
325 ; duty of preserving, 327 ; average 
revenue from, 327 ; regulated by laws 
in France, 395. See Trees , Woods. 

Forests of North America, balance of 
geographical elements in, 27; agency 





554 


INDEX. 


of quadrupeds and insects iu, 32; in¬ 
jury to, by insects, 33; meteorological 
importance of, 139. 

Forest laws, mediaeval, character of, 217 ; 
do. Jewish, 217; severity of, in France 
and England, 280; under Louis IX., 
281; of America, created by circum¬ 
stances, 302. 

France, forest literature and economy 
of, 217; legislation on forests, 233; 

—Southeastern, former physical state of, 
237; altered condition of, 239; royal 
forests of, and forest laws, 280; extent 
of, in, 296; ancient lakes of, 357 ; in¬ 
undations of 1856 in, 393; remedies 
against inundations in, 395; sand dunes 
of Western, 485; encroachments of the 
sea on, 494. 

French peasantry, described by La Bruy- 
ere, 6 ; do. Arthur Young, 7 ; of Cham- 
bord, 283. 

Friesland, sand dunes of, 489. 

Fucinus Lake (Lago di Celano), drainage 
of, by the Romans, 354 ; moderns, 355. 

AME LAWS, effect on the numbers of 
birds in France, 91; in England and 
Italy, 92; severity of, in France, 283; 
unable to stop poaching, 284. 

Ganges, valley of the, 548. 

Gascony, coast sands of, 453; dunes of, 
496; extent and advance of, 497; fix¬ 
ing and reclaiming of, 504; Landes of, 
511; their reclamation, 512. 

Geological influences, 13. 

Geographers, new school of, 8. 

Geographical influence of changes pro¬ 
duced by man, 352. 

Geography, modern, improved form of, 57. 

German Ocean, sands of, 454, 457. 

Germany, extent of forests in, 299. 

Glacier lakes in Switzerland, 403. 

Goat, the Cashmere or Thibet, 83. 

Gold fish, the migration from China, 116. 

Goldau, Switzerland, destruction of, 268. 

Grape disease, its economic effect in 
France, Italy, Sicily, 72. 

Grasshopper, the rapid increase in Ameri¬ 
ca, 291. 

Gravedigger beetle, the, 107. 

Greece, proposed maritime canals in, 
through the Corinthian Isthmus, 526; 
Mount Athos, 527; subterranean wa¬ 
ters of, 536. 

Gulls, sea, habits of, 98. 

Gulf stream, the, 523. 

Gunpowder chiefly used for industrial 
purposes, 335. 


H AARLEM Lake, origin and extent of, 
846, 347; reasons for draining it, 
348; means employed, 349; successful 
results, 350. 

Hauran, the productions of, its soil, 74. 
Heilbronn, springs at, 207. 

Herring fishery, produce of, 120: 

Hessian fly, introduction of in the United 
States, 104. 

Honey bee, the wild, New England, legal 
usage, 302. 

Humid air, movement of, 183. 

Hunter in New England, exploits of, 82. 

I BEX, the Alpine, 86. 

India, saline efflorescence of its soil, 
382 ; natural connection of rivers in, 
401. 

Insects, injurious to vegetable life, 33; 
utility of, 99 ; agency in the fertiliza¬ 
tion of orchids, 102; mass of their 
exuviae in South America, 102; intro¬ 
duction of injurious species, 104, 106 ; 
ravages of, 105; tenacity of life in, 
106; the carnivorous, useful to man, 
107; destruction of, by fish, 108 ; abun¬ 
dance of, in Northern Europe, 108 ; 
destruction of, by birds, 109 ; do. quad¬ 
rupeds, 110; do. reptiles, 110; do not 
multiply in the forest, 291; confine 
themselves to dead trees, 322. 
Inundations, influence of the forest on, 
223 ; of the German Ocean, 334; 
means for obviating, 384; of 1856 in 
France, 393; remedies against, 395; 
legislative regulation of the woodlands 
in France for prevention of, 396 ; pro¬ 
posed basins of reception, 398; do. in 
Peru and Spain, 400 ; Rozet’s plan for 
diminishing, 406. 

Irrigation, remote date of in ancient na¬ 
tions, 366; among Mexicans and Peru¬ 
vians, 366 ; its necessity in hot cli¬ 
mates, 367; in Europe, 367; in Pales¬ 
tine, 368; in Idumaea, 370; Egypt, 
371, 373; quantity of water so applied, 
376, 377; extent of lands irrigated, 
396 ; effects of, 378 ; on river supply, 
380; on human health, 381; saline 
deposits from, in India and Egypt, 382 ; 
effect of, on vegetable crops, 378 ; on 
the soil, 379 ; economic evils of, 379. 
Islands, floating, in Holland and South 
America, 349, 351. 

Ijssel river, Holland, 535. 

Italy, effects of the denudation of its for¬ 
ests, 220; political condition adverse 
to their preservation, 219 ; beauty of 





INDEX. 


555 


its winter scenery, 314; extent of irri¬ 
gation in, 868 ; atmospheric phenomena 
of Northern, 368. 

J UPITER, satellites of, visible to the 
eye, 12. 

Jutland, effects of felling the woods in, 
160; destruction of forests in, 279; 
encroachments of the sea on, 491. 

K ANDER river, Switzerland, artificial 
course of, 403. 

Karst, the subterranean waters of, 536. 
Kjokkenmoddinger in Denmark, 16; 
their extent, 540. 

Kohl, J. G., “ the Herodotus of modem 
Europe,” 340; on dune sand, 475. 

I ’ ABRUGUE&RE, commune of, 208. 

J Laestadius, account of the Swedish 
Laplanders, 96. 

Lakes, draining of, by steam hydraulic en¬ 
gines, 346; natural process of filling up 
by aquatic vegetation, 349; lowering 
of, in ancient and modern times, 353 ; 
in Italy, 354 ; in Switzerland, 356; in¬ 
convenient consequences of, 356; 
mountain, their disappearance, 357. 
Landscape beauty, insensibility of the an¬ 
cients to, 2; of the oasis and the des¬ 
ert, 445. 

Lava currents, diversion of their course, 
544; from Vesuvius, phenomena of, 
545 ; heat emitted by, 645. 

Life, balance of animal and vegetable, 
103. 

Liimfjord, the, irruption of the sea into, 
491; aquatic vegetation of, 492 ; origi¬ 
nal state of, 519. 

Lion, an inhabitant of Europe, 85. 

Lisbon, earthquake of, 544. 

Locust, the, does not multiply in woods, 
296; tree and insect, 32. 

Lombardy, statistics of irrigation in, 376. 
Louis IX., of France, clemency of, 282. 
Lower Alps, department of, ravages of 
torrents in, 246. 

Lumber trade of Quebec, 271; of United 
States, 1850-’60, 301. 

Lungern, lake of, lowering of, 356. 

M ADAGASCAR, gigantic bird of, 96; 
the ai-ai of, 110. 

Madder, early cultivation of, in Europe, 20. 
Madeira, named from its forests, 129. 
Maize, early cultivation of, law of its ac¬ 
climation, 19 ; native country of, 73. 


Malta, transported soil of, 538 ; salt works 
at, 540. 

Man, reaction of, on nature, 8; insuffi¬ 
ciency of data, 9; geographical influ¬ 
ence of, 13; physical revolutions 
wrought by, 14; unpremeditated re¬ 
sults of conscious action, 15; ancient 
relics of, in old geological formations, 

16 ; mechanical effects of, on the earth’s 
surface, 25 ; destructiveness of, 35; in 
animal life and inorganic nature, 36- 
39 ; character of his action compared 
with that of brutes, 42; subversive of 
the balance of nature, 43; sometimes 
exercised for good, 44; present limits 
to, 45 ; transfer of vegetable life by, 
59; remains of, 76; contemporary 
with the mammoth, 77; agency in the 
extermination of birds, 96 ; do. intro¬ 
duction of species, 98; increase of 
insect life, 104; introduction of new 
forms of do. by, 105 ; destruction of 
fish by, 112, 120, 122; extirpation of 
aquatic animals by, 119 ; possible con¬ 
trol of minute organisms, 125 ; his first 
physical conquest, 135; his action on 
land and the waters, 330; possible 
geographical changes by, 517; inci¬ 
dental effects of his action, 539; illimit¬ 
able and ever enduring do., 548. 

Maremme of Tuscany, ancient and medi¬ 
aeval state of, 425 ; extent of, 427 ; in¬ 
habitants, 428 ; improvement of, 429 ; 
sedimenV'i’y deposits of, 425, 430. 

Marine isthmuses, cutting of, 517; its 
difficulties, 518; sometimes done by 
nature, 519. 

Marmato in Popayau, 205. 

Marshes, climatic effects of draining, 358 ; 
insalubrity of mixture of fresh and salt 
water in, 417. 

Mechanic arts, illustration of their mutu¬ 
al interdependence, 307. 

Medanos of the South American desert, 
482. 

Mediterranean Sea, tides of, 425 ; sand 
dunes of, 467; poor in organic life, 520. 

Mella, the river, Italy, 248. 

Meteorology, uncertainty and late rise of, 
16, 22; varying nomenclature of, 23; 
precipitation and evaporation, 24. 

Michigan, lake, sand dunes of, 467 ; origi¬ 
nally wooded, 487 ; proposed diversion 
of its waters, 532. 

Mining excavations, effects of, 545. 

Minute organisms, their offices, 123 ; uni¬ 
versal diffusion and products of, 124, 
127 ; possible control of their agency 







556 


INDEX. 


by man, 125; the coral insect, 125; 
the diatomaceoe, 126. 

Miramichi, great fire of, 28. 

Mistral in France, 153. 

Mississippi river, “ cut offs ” and their ef¬ 
fect, 415 ; precipitation in the valley 
of, 436 ; projected canal to, 533. 

Mountain slides, their cause, 265, 268 ; 
their frequency in the Alps, 267. 

Mountainous countries, their liability to 
physical degradation, 50. 

Monte Testaccio, Rome, 541. 

Moose deer, the American, rapid multi¬ 
plication of, 130. 

Mushrooms, poisonous, how to render 
harmless, 286. 

’VT ATIJR AL forces, accumulation of, 46 ; 

JLi resistance to, 542. 

Nature, man’s reaction on, 8; observa¬ 
tion of, 10 ; stability of, 27, 34 ; res¬ 
toration of disturbed harmonies of, 35; 
nothing small in, 548. 

Naturalists, enthusiasm of, 99. 

Netherlands, ancient inundations of, 334 ; 
recovery of land by diking, 334 ; the 
practice derived from the Romans, 
335 ; extent of land gained from the 
sea, 336 ; do. lost by incursions of do., 
337; character of lands gained, 338; 
natural process of recovery, 339; gran¬ 
deur of the dike system of, 340; meth¬ 
od of their construction in, 341 ; modes 
of protection, 343; various uses of, 

343 ; effect on the level of the land, 

344 ; drainage of do., 345 ; primitive 
condition of, 351; effects on the social, 
moral, and economic interests of the 
people of, 351; sand dunes of, 486; 
encroachments of the sea on, 494; 
artificial dunes in, 499; protection of 
dunes in, 500; removal of do., 509. 

Nile, the river, valley of, 374 ; its ancient 
state, 375 ; inundations of, 385 ; water 
delivery of, 387; artificial mouths of, 
402; consequences of diking, 410, 
413 ; richness of its deposits, 411; ex¬ 
tent of do., 412; mud banks caused by 
its deposits, 433 ; sand dunes at its 
mouths, 468 ; conduits for irrigation, 
521; proposed diversion of, 528 ; not 
impossible, 529 ; effects of, 530 ; cera¬ 
mic banks of, 541. 

Northmen in New England, 60. 

Nubians, Nile boats of the, 17. 

Numbers, the frequent error in too defi¬ 
nite statements of, 260; oriental and 
Italian usage of, 261. 


O AK, the English, early uses in the arts, 
223; “ openings ” of North America, 
136. 

Ohio, mounds of, 18 ; remains of a prim¬ 
itive people in, 135, 138; apple trees 
of, 22. 

Old World, former populousness of, 4; 
physical decay of, 3 ; present desola¬ 
tion of, 5; its causes, 5 ; ancient cli¬ 
mate of, 19; physical restoration of, 
47. 

Olive tree, the wild, 74; importance of, 
312. 

Orange tree known to the ancients, 64; 
the wild, 74. 

Orchids, fertilization of, by insects, 102. 
Organic life embraced in modern geogra¬ 
phy, 57; its geological agency, 75; 
geographical importance of, 7 ; bones 
and relics of, human and animal, 76. 
Ostrich, the, diminution of its numbers, 
97. 

Ottaquechee river, Vermont, transporting 
power of, 253. 

Otter, the American, voracity of, 120. 
Oxen, agricultural uses of, in United 
States, 80. 

Oyster, the, transplantation of, 118. 

P ALESTINE, ancient terrace culture 
and irrigation of, 369 ; disastrous ef¬ 
fects of its neglect, 370. 

Palissy, Bernard, character of, 218 ; plan 
for artificial springs, 447. 

Paragrandini of Lombardy, 141. 
Paramelle, the Abbe, on fountains, 437. 
Teat beds, accidental burning of, 646 ; 
—mosses of Denmark, 32. 

Pecora, river of the Maremma, its depos¬ 
its, 425. 

Peru, ancient progress in the arts, 366 ; 

basins of reception in, 400. 

Petra, in Idumaea, ancient irrigation at, 
370. 

Phosphorescence of the sea unknown to 
the ancients, 114. 

Physical decay of the earth’s surface, 3; 
its causes, 5 ; arrest of, in new countries, 
48 ; forms and formations predisposing 
to, 49. 

Physical geography, study of recommend¬ 
ed, 12; restoration of the earth, 8 ; im¬ 
portance and possibility of, 26 ; of 
disturbed harmonies, 35 ; of the Old 
World, 47. 

Pine, the American, former ordinary di¬ 
mensions of, 275 ; how affected by the 
accidents of its growth, 306 ; the mari- 



INDEX. 


557 


time, on dune sands in France, 506 ; 
the pitch, hardihood of, 273 ; unbrella, 
the, most elegant of trees, 309, 313 ; 
the white, rapidity of its growth, 274. 

Pinus cembra of Switzerland, 309. 

Pisciculture, its valuable results, 118. 

Plants, cultivated, uncertain identity of 
ancient and modern, 19 ; do. of wild and 
domestic species, 73; changes of habit 
by domestication, 19; geographical in¬ 
fluence of, 58 ; foreign, grown in United 
States, 61; American, grown in Europe, 
63 ; modes of introduction, 64; accident¬ 
al do., 66; power of accommodation of, 
65 ; how affected by transfer, 68 ; tena¬ 
city of life in wild species, 69 ; extirpa¬ 
tion of, 70 ; domestic origin of, 72 ; spe¬ 
cies employed for protection of sand 
dunes, 600. 

Pliny, the elder, theorv of springs, 198, 
216. 

Po, river, ancient state of its basin, 255 ; 
modem changes, 256 ; its floods, tribu¬ 
taries, and deposits, 256-261, 405; 
embankments of, 385, 404; sediment 
of, 410; age and consequences of its 
embankments, 411; mean delivery of, 
412 ; salti of, 415. 

Poland, sand plains of, 514. 

Poplar, the Lombardy, 68 ; characterized, 
313. 

Potato, native country of, 73. 

Prairies, conjectural origin of, 134. 

Provence, physical structure of, 237; an¬ 
cient state of, 238; destructive action 
of torrents on, 236 ; Alps of, 245. 

Prussia, sand dunes of, 485 ; drifting of, 
498 ; measures for reclaiming of, 505. 

Q UADRUPEDS, number in United 
States, 79 ; extirpation of, 84. 
Quebec, high tides of, 271; lumber trade 
of, 272. 

AILWAYS, scientific uses of, 53. 

Rain water, its absorption and infil¬ 
tration, 438, 439 ; economizing its pre¬ 
cipitation, 449. 

Ravenna, cathedral of, 60; pine woods 
of, 150. 

Red Sea, richness of, in organic life, 320; 

diversion of the Nile to, its effects, 530. 
Reindeei*, the, 83. 

Reservoirs, geographic and climatic effects 
of, 258. 

Reventlov’s organization of dune economy 
in Denmark, 504 ; a benefactor to his 

race, 515. 


Rhine, river, proposed diversion of, 533. 

Rice, cultivation of, 381. 

Rivers, transporting power of, 252; in 
Vermont, 253; their origin, 262 ; in¬ 
jury to their banks by lumbermen, 277 ; 
conditions of their rise and fall, 278 ; 
mutual action of rivers and valleys, 
408 ; effect of obstructions in, 409; 
subterranean course of, 409 ; confluen¬ 
ces of, effect on the current below, 424; 
sediment of, its extent, 547. 

River beds, natural change of, 401 ; arti¬ 
ficial do. in Egypt, 402; Italy and 
Switzerland, 403. 

River deposits, 408; of the Nile, 410; 
the Po, 411; the Tuscan rivers, 414. 

River embankments, 384 ; their use, 404; 
disadvantages, 405; transverse do., su¬ 
periority of, 406 ; effects of, 409. 

River mouths, obstructions of, 430; by 
sand banks, 431; accelerated by man’s 
influence, 432 ; effect of tidal move¬ 
ments, 432. 

Robin, the American, voracity of, 88. 

Rock generally permeable by water, 265. 

Roman empire, natural advantages of its 
territory, 1; increased by intelligent 
labor, 2 ; physical decay of, 3 ; present 
desolation, 4 ; caused by its despotism 
and oppression, 5. 

Rozet’s plan for diminishing inundations, 
406. 

Rude ti'ibes, continuity of arts among, 17; 
comme/ue of, 18 ; relations to organic 
life, 39; and to nature, 41. 

Russia, diminution of forests in, 298 ; ef¬ 
fects of, on rivers and lakes, 299 ; sand 
drifts of the steppes of, 514 ; attempts 
to reclaim them, 515. 

S ACRAMENTO City, California, effect 
of river dike at, 405. 

Sand, its composition and origin, 452; 
action of rivers, 453 ; ancient deposits 
of, 454, 456; amount of, carried to the 
Mediterranean, 455; of Egypt, 458, 
461 ; movement of, by the wind, 459; 
drifts of, from the sea, 461; dangers of 
accumulation of, 463 ; two forms of 
deposit, 463 ; drifting of dune, 495, 
Sand banks, aquatic, 468 ; movement of, 
469; connect themselves with the 
coast, 490. 

Sand dunes, how formed, 464 ; utiliza¬ 
tion of, 465 ; inland, of the South 
American desert, 482 ; their peculiari¬ 
ties, 483 ; age, character, and perma¬ 
nence of, 484 ; naturally wooded, 486; 






558 


INDEX. 


not noticed by ancient writers, 487; 
management of, 488; coast, sources of 
supply, 465 ; law of their formation, 
466, 471, 483 ; of the Mediterranean, 
467; of Lake Michigan, 467; of the 
Nile mouths, 468 ; of America, 469 ; 
of Western Europe, 470 ; literature of, 
471; height of, 472 ; humidity of, 473 ; 
of Cape Cod, 487; character of their 
sand, 474, 481; concretion within, 
476 ; interior structure of, 477 ; gener¬ 
al form of, 478; geological importance 
of, 479; composition of sandstone, 
481; as barriers against the sea, 489 ; 
in Western Europe, 490; extent of, 
607; of Gascony, 496 ; of Denmark, 
497; of Prussia, 497; artificial forma¬ 
tion of, in Holland, 499 ; protection of, 
500 ; by vegetation, 501 ; trees adapt¬ 
ed to, 505 ; removal of, 509. 

Sand-dune vineyard of Cap Breton, 508. 

Sand plains, mode of deposit, 464 ; con¬ 
stituent parts, 464; inland, of Europe, 
509; landesof Gascony, 511; Belgium, 
513; Eastern Europe, 513; advanta¬ 
ges of reclaiming, 515; pi'ivate and 
public enterprise, 516. 

Sand springs, 511. 

Sandal wood extirpated in Juan Fernan¬ 
dez, 130. 

Saros, projected canal of, 527. 

Sawmills, action of their machinery more 
rapid by night, 278. 

Schelk, the extirpation of, 85. 

Schleswig-Holstein, encroachments of the 
sea on, 493. 

Scientific observation, practical lessons of, 
54-56. 

Sea, the, exclusion of, by dikes, in Lin¬ 
colnshire, 333 ; encroachments of, 490; 
coast, 491; the Liimfjord, 491; Schles¬ 
wig-Holstein, 493 ; Holland, 494 ; 
France, 494. 

Sea cow, Steller’s, extirpation of, 119. 

Seal, the, in Lake Champlain, 117; vo¬ 
racity of, 120. 

Seeds, vitality of, as preserved by the 
forest, 287, 289. 

Seine river, ancient level of, 214; afflu¬ 
ents of, 435. 

Ship building of the middle ages, Venice 
and Genoa, 218. 

Siberia, ice ravine in, 158. 

Sicily, stone weapons found in, 18 ; sul¬ 
phur mines of, 72 ; olive oil crop of, 
312. 

Silkworm, introduction in South America, 
105. 


Sinai, Mt., rain torrent at, 441; produc¬ 
tion of sand in peninsula of, 454; gar¬ 
den of monastery at, 537. 

Snakes, destructive to insects, 110; te¬ 
nacity of species, 111; number of, in 
Palestine and Egypt, 111. 

Snow, action of the woods on, 211 ; ex¬ 
periments on, 212. 

Soils, amount of thermoscopic action on 
various, 144; mechanical effects of 
shaking in the Netherlands, 344 ; effect 
of frost on, in United States, 344. 

Solar heat, economic employment of, 47. 

Solitary, the, extirpation of, 95. 

Sound, transmission of, in still air, 165. 

Springs, artificial, proposed by Palissy, 
447; by Babinet, 448. 

Spain, neglect of forest culture in, 279. 

Squirrel, the, destructiveness of, in for¬ 
ests, 34 ; of Boston, 121. 

St. Helena, flora of, 65 ; destruction of 
its forests, 130. 

Staffordshire, phenomena of vegetation 
in, 288. 

Starlings, habits of, in Piedmont, 111. 

Stork, the, geographical range of, 93 ; an¬ 
ecdote of a, 99. 

Subterranean waters, their origin, 434; 
sources of supply, 435 ; reservoirs and 
currents of, 438 ; diffusion of, in the 
soil, 439; importance, 440; of the 
Karst, 535 ; of Greece, 536. 

Suez canal, the, danger from sand drifts, 
461 ; effect on the Mediterranean and 
Red Sea basins, 520. 

Sugar cane, culture of, 62. 

Sugar-maple tree, produce of, 169. 

Summer dikes of Holland, 342. 

Sunflowers, effect of plantations of, 154. 

Swallow, the, popular superstitions re¬ 
specting, 418. 

Switzerland, ancient lacustrine habitations 
of, 16, 70, 83. 

Sylt Island, sand dunes of, 474; en¬ 
croachments of the sea on, 493. 

Sylviculture, best manuals of practice of, 
304 ; when and how profitable, 305 ; 
its methods, 315 ; the treatment, 

315; the futaie do., 317 ; beneficial ef¬ 
fects of irrigation, 319; exclusion of 
animals, 321; removal of leaves, &c., 
322 ; topping and trimming, 324. 

T AGUATAGA Lake, Chili, 355. 

Tea plant, the, cultivated in America, 
62. 

Temperature, general law of, 52. 

Teredo, the general diffusion of, 107. 



INDEX. 


559 


Termite, or white ant, ravages of, 107. 

Teverone, cascade of, Tivoli, 402. 

Timber, general superiority of cultivated, 
305 ; slow decay of, in forest, 322. 

Tobacco an American plant, 63; intro¬ 
duction in Hungary, 67. 

Tocat, Asia Minor, oak woods of, 186. 

Tomato, the, introduction to New Eng¬ 
land, 19. 

Torricelli, successful plan for draining the 
Val di Chiana, 421. 

Torrents, destructive action of, 231; 
means of prevention, 233 ; ravages of, 
in Southeastern France, 237; Pro¬ 
vence, 239 ; Upper Alps, 240; Lower 
Alps, 246; action of, in elevating the 
beds of mainland streams, 249; in ex¬ 
cavating ravines, 250; transporting 
power of, 251 ; signs of, extinguished, 
263 ; crushing force of, 392. 

Trees, as organisms, specific temperature 
of, 156; moisture given out by, 158; 
total influence on temperature, 159; 
absorption of water by, 166; flow of 
sap, 169; absorption of moisture by 
foliage of, 172; exhalation of do., 174; 
consequent refrigeration, 175; amount 
of ligneous products of, 173; protec¬ 
tion against avalanches afforded by, 
269; power of resisting the action of 
fire, 273 ; American forest trees, 274; 
their dimensions, 275 ; change in rela¬ 
tive proportions of height and diameter, 
276; comparative longevity of, 277; 
European and American compared, 
308; species more numerous in Ameri¬ 
ca, 309; Spenser’s catalogue of, 308 ; 
interchange of European and American 
species, 310; species of Southern Eu¬ 
rope and their extent, 312; natural or¬ 
der of succession in, 323. See Forest, 
Woods. 

Trieste, proposed supply of water to, 
536. 

Trout, the American, 115, 117, 121. 

Tuscany, rivers of, their deposits, 414 ; 
physical restoration in, 416; improve¬ 
ments in Val di Chiana, 417; do. in 
the Maremma, 424. 

Tyrolese rivers, elevation of their beds, 
249. 

U BATE, lakes of, New Granada, 204. 

Undulation of water, 456. 

United States, foreign plants grown in, 
61; weight of annual harvest in, 62 ; 
number of quadrupeds in, 79; of birds, 
86; effect of felling woods on its cli¬ 


mate, 180; forests of, 300; instability 
of life in, 328. 

Upper Alps, department of, ravages of 
torrents in, 240. 

Urus, or auerochs, domesticated by man, 
83; extirpation of, 85. 

Y AL de Lys, evidence of glacier action 
in, 252. 

Vegetable life, transfer by man’s action, 
59. 

Velino, cascade of, Tivoli, 402. 

Vesuvius, vegetation on, 131; eruption 
of February, 1851, 544. 

Volcanic action, resistance to, 544 ; mat¬ 
ter, vegetation in, 131. 

Volga river, proposed diversion of, 531. 

W ALCHEREN, formation of the island, 
340. 

Wallenstadt, lake of, 534. 

Walnut tree, consumption of, for gun 
stocks, 296; oil yielded by, 310. 
Ward’s cases for plants, 175. 

Waste products, utilization of, 37. 

Weeds common to Old and New World, 
66; extirpated in China, &c., 71. 
Whale, the, food of, 113; destruction of, 
114. 

Whale fishery, date of its commencement 
unknown, 112; in the middle ages, 
112; American, 113. 

Wheat, its asserted origin, 73; introduc¬ 
tion to 4 T nerica, 74. 

Wild animals, number of, 84. 

Wild organisms, vegetable and animal, 
tenacity of life in, 69. 

Willow, the weeping, introduction in Eu¬ 
rope, 64. 

Wolf, increase of the, 84; prevalence in 
forests of France, 296. 

Wolf Spring, Soubey, 206. 

Wood, increased demand for, 293; ship 
building, railroads, &c., 294; market 
price of, 294; replaced by iron in the 
arts, 295; means of increasing its dura¬ 
bility, 295; how affected by rapid 
growth, 306; facilities for working, 
307. 

Woods, habitable earth originally covered 
by, 128; conditions of their propaga¬ 
tion, 131; destructive agency of man 
and domestic animals, 132; do not 
furnish food for man, 133; first remov¬ 
al of, 134 ; burning of, 136 ; in Sweden 
and France, 137; effect on the soil, 
138; destruction of, its effect, 139; 
electrical influence of, 140; chemical 



INDEX. 


5 GO 

influence of, 142; influence on tem¬ 
perature, 143 ; absorbing and emitting 
surface of, 144 ; in summer and winter, 
147; dead products of, 148; as a 
shelter, 149; in France, 149, 151; 
New England, 149; Italy and Jut¬ 
land, 150; as a protection against ma¬ 
laria, 154 ; tend to mitigate extremes 
of temperature, 155. See Forest , 
Trees. 

Wood mosses and fungi, absorbent of 
moisture, 168. 


Woodpecker, the, destroyer of insects, 
109. 

AK, or Tartary ox, the, 83. 

Yew tree, geographical range of, 70. 

Z EELAND, province, formation of, 339. 
Zostera marina, 492. 

Zuiderzee, proposed drainage of, 534; 
means of, and geographical results, 

535. 



THE END. 



f c r* -1 

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LONDON ; W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. 





























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